Using existing Boot Camp partition with Parallels

Question

I am thinking of buying the latest version of Parallels, version 6, to run on my shiny new iMac. I already have my drive partitioned to use Boot Camp with Windows 7 and everything runs smoothly, but I like the idea of being able to load up Windows to do quick testing of things (i.e. test something on IE8, or a quick compile in Visual Studio) without having to reboot my whole computer and interrupt my workflow.

Are there any gotchas or known problems with installing & using Parallels with an existing Boot Camp partition?

Answer 1

There don't seem to be. All you have to do is to set your boot camp partition as a bootable partition in Parallels.

Answer 2

I have done exactly what you want to do, in this past week. ("bootcamp winupdate causes problems

I had some issues getting the bootcamp parting working after importing it into osx as a VM, but solved it by using a windows install disc to repair the VM's boot sector.

Let me know if you run into trouble.