I have installed windows 7 using parallels on my mac internal hard drive but now i am running out of space. So i am wondering if i can move windows and all of its relevant data and run it from an external hard drive and if so how.
Since Windows is contained in one large file known as a virtual machine, you can move it to an external hard drive. The problem you may run into is getting Parallels to access the VM after it has been moved. You may have to create the VM again so that Parallels will know where it is. Also another consideration is this.... Windows will run slow from an external drive.
I actually have Linux running off of Virtualbox off of a external thunderbolt drive. Seems to work quite well. I haven't tried Windows yet but I would expect performance to be pretty good.
As chscag mentioned - you can move the VM to the drive - then let parallels open it - it should create everything you need to run. One thing I've found is if you have multiple virtual disks - you may have to repoint to each individual disk - but that was a while ago.
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