Creating a Virtual Machine for the Boot Camp Partition

To create a new virtual machine for using the Boot Camp Windows partition, do the following:

1. Boot into Mac OS X.
2. Start Parallels Desktop, and launch New Virtual Machine Assistant by clicking New in the File menu.
3. In the Operating System Detection window, select the Boot Camp Partition option, and click Continue .
4. In this step, define the main parameters for your virtual machine:
   • Name . Indicate the name to be assigned to the virtual machine. By default, the virtual machine gets the name of the operating system that you selected to be installed in this virtual machine. If a virtual machine with this name already exists, you will be prompted to specify another name. The name must not exceed 50 characters.
   • Let other Mac users access this virtual machine. Select this option if you want to share this virtual machine with other users of your Mac. In this case the virtual machine file (PVM file) will be saved in the / Users/Shared folder on your Mac.
   • Location . In this field, specify the virtual machine files location.
   • Sharing . Use this field to configure access to the disks and folders on the physical computer from inside the virtual machine. After the virtual machine creation, you can edit these settings in the Shared Folders pane of Virtual Machine Configuration.

     Note: If your Boot Camp is divided into several partitions, only the bootable partition will be added to the virtual machine configuration. If you want to add the other partitions, you should add them as separate virtual hard disks to Virtual Machine Configuration. For detailed information, see Boot Camp Configurations .

   

   If you click the Advanced button, you can set the number of CPUs and the amount of RAM of your future virtual machine.

   When finished, click Create .

The newly created virtual machine will be accessible through Parallels Virtual Machine List that allows you to easily manage your virtual machines. When you boot into Boot Camp Windows through Parallels Desktop for the first time, Parallels Desktop will install Parallels Tools .

After that, you can use Boot Camp as usually to boot into the Windows partition , or you can boot into it via the Parallels virtual machine .