Now, a few things I noticed: first off, it seems to me that I must have installed the Parallels Tools into the Boot Camp vm at least four times, which is definitely weird. The final test, of course, is to shut down my Mac and reboot in Windows XP through Boot Camp to confirm that nothing’s broken…and… it worked like a charm. I followed directions, waited and left it alone, and a few minutes later it rebooted Windows and other than being cranky about me not yet having reactivated WinXP, it all worked just fine! Here’s proof of my WinXP working just fine off the Boot Camp partition: Once I went to log in to Windows, however, I got this interesting message: Parallels warned me that this might be a bad idea, but since I couldn’t use the mouse to select “Shut Down”, stopping the Parallels vm was my only choice.įortunately, while it did reinstall the Parallels tools yet again, it worked more smoothly this time and my mouse worked from the very first time I saw an arrow cursor in the vm. I simply shut down the vm and restarted it. More excitingly, you’ll get to see this:Įventually the warning banner went away and I found that there was some sort of problem and the mouse wasn’t working. Not a worry, Parallels is just configuring everything properly.

When you first run the new virtual machine, it’ll ask that you type in your (Mac) admin password. Okay, so maybe “WinXP (Boot Camp)” isn’t the most exotic of names, but at least I’ll remember the configuration! Then it’s time to come up with snazzy name for the new partition:

I suggest “Shared Networking (recommended)”. Now you’ll get to specify what kind of networking interface you want between your virtual machine and your Mac OS X system. You can guess the proper choice here, “Use Boot Camp”. I suggest at least 768MB if you can spare it. Next you’ll need to specify how much RAM you want to allocate to the virtual machine: like any other Windows installation, the more RAM, the better. Rather than “Windows Express”, however, choose “Custom”, then choose “Windows” and “Windows XP” when asked what OS you want to install. Now you’ll need to choose which type of OS install you want: Just about everything happens within Mac OS X, so your first step is to start up Parallels Desktop, then click File –> New…. The former, having a single installation of Windows XP accessible both through Parallels and Boot Camp, sounds like a tremendous capability, so that’s what I set up, and here are the exact steps I took… In fact, there are two ways you can hook in the Boot Camp partition, either as a bootable vm, or as a secondary hard disk on another WinXP vm (that is, as disk “D:” or similar). The latest release of the slick Parallels Desktop application does indeed support you using a Bootcamp partition as a virtual machine disk within the Parallels application.

Parallels desktop bootcamp