November 5, 2007

Converting an OS X Bootcamp Partition to a VMWare Virtual Machine

by Brian Donahue

This is just one of those "note to self" posts that was the result of a lot of frustrating googling. 

Now that I'm using VMWare Fusion, I wanted to ditch my 40GB Bootcamp partition that was hogging up a good chunk of my 100GB hard drive.  So I downloaded VMWare Converter and tried to import a Virtual Machine from it.  Every time I booted it I would get an error message " Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem."  I tried importing an image twice (this took about 7 hours each time with 32GB worth of junk on that partition).  No dice.  I couldn't find many articles about converting Bootcamp partition from a physical machine to a virtual (P2V for those googling for this stuff themselves!) but finally I stumbled across this Parallels forum thread:

http://forum.parallels.com/thread16064.html

I followed the instructions and created a new hardware profile for the machine:

1. Open your "System Properties" either through the Control Panel or by right-clicking on "My Computer" and going to Properties.

2. Go to the "Hardware" tab and click on "Hardware Profiles".

3. Rename the current profile "Boot Camp", and then copy it. Rename the copy "Parallels".

4. Under "Hardware profiles selection", make sure "Wait until I select a hardware profile" is selected.

5. Check the properties of each profile and make sure the following options are selected:
"This is a portable computer"
"The docking state is unknown"
"Always include this profile as an option when Windows starts"

6. Click "OK" on everything.

I then imported a new image and selected my new hardware profile on bootup and voila!  Working VM.  Goodbye partition!

P.S. Installing Leopard as I type this!