Parallels Answers the Expiring Mac Boot Camp Issue

While the pending release of Leopard coming from Apple is something that Mac users are highly anticipating and waiting for, it also means that the current license for Boot Camp Beta expires soon. So if you are a Mac OS X Tiger user using Boot Camp, you are going to have to upgrade to Leopard or find an alternate route to continue using your Boot Camp environment. While most users will no doubt be upgrading their environment, for some, this just isn’t an option. At least not right away.

Fortunately, Ben Rudolph, Director of Corporate Communications for SWsoft, says that Parallels Desktop for Mac users just so happen to have an alternate route. Rudolph says, “If you’re not ready to upgrade to Leopard right away and still want to use your Boot Camp partition, Parallels makes life very, very easy.”

Rudolph states that “for months now, Parallels Desktop has been able to use a Boot Camp partition as a virtual hard drive, meaning that you can boot your Windows XP or Windows Vista partition in a virtual machine at any time, and move back and forth between the two. When Boot Camp’s license expires, you can still access your hard drive partition without using Boot Camp by booting the partition into a virtual machine.”

And more importantly with that option, Rudolph says you won’t have to reinstall anything or worry about losing any of your critical Windows files.

The fast paced programmers at Parallels are also supposedly working on another option, although not quite ready yet. Down the road, the company hopes to be able to offer Desktop for Mac users the ability to fully migrate their Boot Camp partition to a fully-functional Parallels virtual machine. The hope is that users will be able to use their free copy of the bundled Parallels Transporter utility to perform that conversion at some future time. Doing so would allow those users to then take advantage of other Parallels features such as undo disks and snapshots.

It’s certainly nice to have options, isn’t it?