Cloning Bootable Windows HDD

Howdy,

I have a laptop hard drive that has Windows XP installed on it and I would like to clone that and make it a bootable drive that I can virtualize with Parallels in a Mac environment.

Is this possible? If so, how do I go about doing it?

I tried pulling the drive out and making a .CDR with DiskUtility but that didn't work.

Halp!

Thanks!

Z

Welcome to Mac-Forums jinxdroid
You could try making a bootable external hdd or thumb drive from it.
Google Windows XP bootable thumb drive/ external HDD there are plenty of discussions and tutorials about it.
Hope this helps

- Simon

The problem is that this is a work laptop and I don't have admin access to install anything. Oem HP.

I DD'd the drive last night to make a .dmg but Mac can't mount it because or doesn't recognize the NTFS file system.

Parallels can't do anything with it either.

What if I create a win xp virtual pc and install my own legit copy of XP and then see If I can get Parallels to restore using that cloned disk?

Thanks

Z

That should work theoretically although I personally have never tried it.
Have a go and let us know the results of it.

- Simon

Will do! I'm also going to see if Google MacFUSE will work. It's supposed to add NTFS and other filesystem handlers to OSX. Will report back both ways.

Danke.

I can think of a few ways of doing it...

Since parallels can access a .vhd image (so I've read), if you have access to a windows 7 machine:

1. Attach your laptop drive to the windows 7 machine (USB caddy etc.)
2. In Win7 Disk Management, create an empty .vhd
3. Clone the XP drive to the empty .vhd file (using something like ghost32.exe) then unmount it.
4. Copy the .vhd file to your mac and boot it under parallels.

You may need to play with the IDE/SATA drivers to get it to boot (google idefix registry fix)- I'm about to go through the same thing, transfering my old Win7 laptop to a virtual image.

Mike

Thanks Mike,

I'm going to try that now. I tricked MS into giving me a trial copy of Win 7 Enterprise edition

Fools! I just need to use it for an hour to copy this drive. MUHAUHAUHA

Will report back