Running Windows Withing Mac

[Rhodderz]

So i have a fully working (audio and everything) mac Mountain Lion working with another partition with windows 7 on.
Now the only thing i want to do now is use my already installed windows (with settings etc) running in a VM type solution on the Mac OS.
I remember seeing my Uni tutors doing this but with bootcamp (which i could not get to work in Mountain Lion even with all the tweaks i did)
and wondered if anyone knew of a nice solution. I heard of Parallels for Mac that did just that BUT used bootcamp and apparently people have had a few issues with it on a hackintosh.
Any help is appreciated and if I'm successful ill put a little guide up so others can quickly do this as well.

Thanks in advance,
Rhodderz.

 

[Rhodderz]

bump

 

[Rhodderz]

No one has any thoughts on this?

 

[jmmsrv]

VMware

I've been running windows 7 with VMware in i0.7.3 & 10.7.4 for a while now. Nothing special to set it up at all,

 

[Rhodderz]

Ah but is that using an existing installation of windows?

 

[jmmsrv]

When I first installed VMware I did transfer the 64 bit version from my laptop. There are only 2 applications I need once in a while that are 32 bit. So I did install a fresh 32 bit windows 7 in VMware. Both versions worked no problem, there is an option to move an existing version of windows to VMware. I have since deleted the 64 bit Vitual Machine from VMware mostly because of disc space & I didn't need it, I still use the 32 bit Virtual Machine a few times a week.

 

[Rhodderz]

What im wondering is, if i use a as the guy above said, a vitual machine and "import" my installation of windows and use that within mac, but also when i boot back into windows that all my stuff will be there (and new stuff if i added/created it in mac)

 

[zee2]

Just in case you didn't find a solution yet...

Give VMWare Fusion a try. I know it has a way to automatically import a bootcamp partition (I understand it doesn't apply to you), so the functionality of using a physical disk is there. A couple of days ago I had to use a physical disk to install XP on via /syspart switch, but it did involve a bit of "hacking".

Basically, make a new virtual machine in fusion and add a standard HDD to it. Make sure the VM type matches your OS (7 x64 for example). Don't start the machine yet. Right click on the machine name and open the containing folder. Find the hard drive file and from here on out, follow the first comment on this post:

http://www.vijayp.ca/blog/2011/09/attaching-a-physical-raw-disk-to-vmware-fusion-4-without-bootcamp/

I know it looks confusing at first, but basically you just create an address file for that partition you want to use in vmware, by using vmware's own utility. The utility is here: /Applications/VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/Library/vmware-rawdiskCreator

Run it and look at the options, it has a way to simply use a partition rather than the whole disk. The issue is, once the virtual machine is started, the partition is not available on the mac anymore. Only when you shut down the virtual machine and close vmware do you get the partition back in OS X.

Once the file is created by rawdiskcreator, copy the file inside the folder I asked you to find earlier. Swap the empty vmx with your rawdiskcreator one (rename original to something else, rename rawdiskcreator one to original name), then start the machine.

Note: Never tried it, but in theory it should work.