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I have a copy of OS X Leopard running on a partitioned hard drive. The other partition has a copy of Windows XP running on bootcamp. As a result of this I can boot into either Windows xp OR Mac OS X natively.

I want to be able to run them both at the same time which i've been told can be doing using VMWARE Fusion..

My question is, how do i go about doing this once I have a copy of VMWare Fusion?

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From the Getting started manual:

To create a virtual machine from the Boot Camp partition

  1. From the Virtual Machine Library window, select Boot Camp partition, which is automatically detected, and click the run arrow.
  2. Enter your Mac password to access the Boot Camp partition. You must have administrator privileges to use the Boot Camp as a virtual machine. VMware Fusion creates a virtual machine from your Boot Camp partition and starts Windows.
  3. After Windows boots from your Boot Camp virtual machine, VMwareFusion starts the installation of VMware Tools to enable full virtual machine functionality and optimize performance for your Boot Camp partition when used as a virtual machine. Follow the onscreen instructions and restart your virtual machine when prompted.
  4. When the VMware Tools installation is complete, reboot your computer. The first time you power on your Boot Camp virtual machine after installing VMware Tools, you will need to reactivate Windows.

Works fine, though sometimes a second copy of the bootcamp item appears in the selector menu, this is harmless. Virtualised XP is great!

Note Parallels also allows integration with Bootcamp, and it may be possible though seems not well supported in Virtualbox...

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  • This feature is one of the main selling points of VMWare fusion over VirtualBox for me. Does anyone know if Parallels can do this as well?
    – Matt
    Aug 27, 2009 at 14:41
  • Yes, I actually find Parallels handles the Bootcamp partition better than VMWare when it works (both faster, less delay on first boot), but Parallels is more buggy than VMWare, so it is a trade-off; I run Parallels on my machine but set up VMware for my co-workers - all using a VM bootcamp XP. Aug 27, 2009 at 15:53
  • I have to say that VMware 3 (which I own) and Parallels 5 (which I’ve been trying for the next 12 remaining days), are on par with the number of bugs. I’d say VMware 3 actually has more issues than Parallels 5. That’s my experience after using vmware3 since launch and suddenly downloading parallels trial and importing my vms. I see more issues with vmware. I use Visual Studio 2008, Vista, XP and SQL 2008 primarly. Also Ubuntu 9.10 works “out of the box” with Parallels (even compiz and such). Under VMware I had sound/video issues and tools were a PITA. VMware 2 vs Parallels 4< was different. Nov 13, 2009 at 12:12

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