Booting XP off external hard drive under OS X

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jahc

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#52244 2-Dec-2009 19:02

I want to rip the hard drive out of my PC, sell/give away the PC, put it's hard drive in an external enclosure, perferably a firewire one, then plug it into a Mac, and boot the existing XP environment in a virtualised space so I can have XP and OS X side by side.. Is this possible?

chiefie

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#278833 2-Dec-2009 19:11

Why don't you do P2V to the external HDD and run Parallel or Fusion?

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jahc

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#278842 2-Dec-2009 19:21

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical-to-Virtual ? Sounds good. I like this idea.. if I understand it right..

My main XP partition is 100gb (nearly full). I could convert that into a virtual drive onto my Mac Minis tiny hd, (just), and then delete the original HD partition, and copy the newly made virtual partition back onto it? Or something similar? :) (might need to be resized a bit to fit properly..)

chiefie

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#278847 2-Dec-2009 19:30

Worthwhile to remove temp and ALL the unnecessary stuff, defrag, do spring cleaning and what-not, then P2V.

There are few tools to P2V but I'm not too familiar with though, check with guys that have run P2V and/or Parallel/Fusion. But it is certainly an option.

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jahc

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#278849 2-Dec-2009 19:34

Cool. :)

Whats the speed like on parallel and vm fusion anyway? near native? I'm not a gamer. I just want a responsive machine when I'm doing the bits I cant fully move to to OS X.

chiefie

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#278851 2-Dec-2009 19:39

It's "close" to native. It'll be fine for normal usage, but gaming in VM is never ideal (or to some cases, doesn't work well even).

If you want a native speed, you'll need to boot camp it, but it'll be different way to go about doing it.

ALSO, is your PC comes with the Windows XP? If so, is it OEM/Branded PC? You cannot separate the Windows license from the PC it is bundled with. If you own the retail copy of the Windows, then you can "move it about" as you wish.

The boot camp method could be - with your own retail copy of Windows XP - to install the basic Windows XP partition on your Mac. Then on your PC, you could try its FAST to migrate over from (old) Windows XP to the boot camp Windows XP via ethernet connection, or to an external HDD then import into new Windows XP.

Confused?

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jahc

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#278852 2-Dec-2009 19:44

Yes, very. hehe. I'll have to check my Windows cardboard thingy that came with the cd. But thats some good info me to start with. Close native on a Core 2 duo 2.23ghz is better than native on a Pentium4 1.8ghz I would think!

Thanks for the help. :)

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stevenz

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#280597 9-Dec-2009 07:38

Some flavours of XP get a bit upset when the hardware changes that drastically, so you may need to do a repair install.

OS X should detect a bootable XP partition and offer it as a boot option though. Given the option I prefer Parallels to VMWare Fusion, mainly as its functionality for booting from other physical partitions seems a bit more robust.

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jonherries

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#287361 6-Jan-2010 10:36

Another option if you are interested in virtualisation is virtual box from Sun which is FOSS.

Something to keep in mind is that in order to use XP in Bootcamp, you need an xp install disk that has SP2.

HTH,

Jon

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wazzageek

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#287425 6-Jan-2010 13:24

Not mentioned here yet is the amount of RAM you have ... remember that you will need slightly more than RAM you require for both OS X AND Windows if you are virtualising (i.e. if your machine currently has 1 GB and you use 2 GB in your Mac, you will require 3+GB of RAM to keep things running).

It's slightly more as you will require an overhead for the virtualisation software.

Speed wise, things are internet browsing etc. is approximately the same speed.