Importing a VHD into Parallels Desktop 6 on the Mac

Question

I've looked everywhere for this but can't find an answer, so:

I have a VHD image created for me by a client -- he installed Win7 on a machine and then used a tool from SysInternals to create a VHD which he shared with me and a colleague.

I can mount the VHD on my Mac using Parallels Mounter and see the contents, but I can't for the life of me see how to import the VHD to create a new Parallels VM from the VHD file. Parallels Transporter seems to want to create a VM from a live Windows box, which this isn't.

My colleague is able to use VirtualBox to create a VM from the VHD and I want to do the same using Parallels Desktop 6.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Parallels is designed to import virtual machines rather than virtual hard disks. A VHD is just the hard disk, and doesn't specify anything about the machine.

So the answer is that you need to create a simple virtual machine that uses the VHD; Parallels can then import that (for Parallels 7 see ftt's answer below). To do that, create a simple UTF-8 text file with an extension .vmc containing the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<preferences>
<version type="string">2.0</version>
<hardware>
<pci_bus>
<ide_adapter>
<ide_controller id="0">
<location id="0">
<drive_type type="integer">1</drive_type>
<pathname>
<absolute type="string">/Users/Shared/VirtualPC/BaseDrive.vhd</absolute>
<relative type="string">BaseDrive.vhd</relative>
</pathname>
</location>
</ide_controller>
</ide_adapter>
</pci_bus>
</hardware>
</preferences>    

Make sure you change the .vhd references above to the actual location of your VHD file.

The above code is from a recommendation by a Parallels team member on Parallels forum.