Oct 11 2006

Converting a Virtual PC image to Parallels mac

notarus | General, Open Source, Software, mac | 2 Comments

Update 12/15/06: You might check out the new Parallels Transporter beta, http://forum.parallels.com/thread5999.html It looks like this will do all the below, but without the ftp
server in the middle?

For those of you who have a Virtual PC image that you just can’t live without, and upgraded from a PPC mac to an Intel mac (and thus Virtual PC to Parallels),
here’s a relatively quick way to convert the images.More information on how to use G4u is available at their home site.

Please note that you absolutely require at least Parallels build 1940 to run G4U.

  1. On your new mac, go to the Accounts control panel and create a user named “install”. Give it a password. You’ll need this account later.
  2. While you’re in the control panels, go to Sharing and enable the FTP server.
  3. On your OLD mac:
  4. download the g4u (”ghost for unix”) iso at http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4u-1.17.iso.zip . Unzip
  5. Fire up your Virtual PC, and capture the above ISO in your CDrom. Reboot if neccessary so that you boot off of it.
  6. Make a note of how large this disk image is.
  7. When you get a prompt, you want to copy your disk to your new server. Assuming you have one disk and one partition on this disk, use something like uploaddisk yournewmacip diskimage.gz wd0 .
  8. wd0 is the name that g4u knows your first disk as.
  9. diskimage.gz is the name your disk will be saved as on your new mac
  10. Wait until the disk is entirely copied. At this point you can close your virtual pc program.
  11. Now, go to your NEW mac
  12. Download the g4u (”ghost for unix”) iso at http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4u-1.17.iso.zip . Unzip
  13. Fire up Parallels and create a new guest OS. Give it a hard drive at least as large as what the Virutal PC guest had
  14. Boot your new GuestOS. Capture the G4U iso, and reboot the guest if necessary to boot it.
  15. When it’s finished booting, run the following command to download and unpack your disk image: slurpdisk localhost diskimage.gz
  16. Wait for this to finish.
  17. Uncapture the cd rom, and reboot your GuestOS.
  18. Go to your sharing control panel, and turn off FTP
  19. Go to your accounts panel, and delete the install account

At this point, you should have a working copy of your original Guest OS.

For more information, please see the G4U home page at http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/

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