Installing Parallels on Mac OS X to get Windows XP Pro going

When I first started up Parallels after installing it, it seemed to find the My Boot Camp virtual machine. I'm not really sure where it came from. I tried to run it and at hung up, trying to 'start from hard drive'. Anyway, I deleted it (seems to be just a 4kB file somewhere in my Documents folder).

I ran Parallels Desktop again, and this time it did what the Quick Start guide said it would - offer to make a new VM. Good. The 'more options' section has the very useful option to Share virtual machine with other Mac users, which forces you to put the VM in /Users/Shared/Parallels - this is good I think, means other people could use Word and Excel and so on.

I was also able to tell it to install from the XP Pro image I had made as a backup on my desktop - neat.

However, it seemed to try to boot from various devices then said non-system disk or disk error. Oh. I selected Devices->CD/DVD 1 and told it to use the hardware DVD drive and it worked after that. Hmm.

Unlike the last time I had this going, I haven't had to create a separate partition. There is a file called winxp.hdd in the Parallels folder for the VM, and it keeps getting bigger as the copy/install happens. That's great - it was awful having this unnecessary partition last time. Only I made such a partition already, thinking I would need it!

Coherence doesn't work like it used to - seems to say I have to install the Parallels Tools. I do this from Parallels menu Actions -> Install Parallels tools. That works much nicer now, and has, as promised, linked up my Desktop and other folders.

Also do Actions -> Install Kapersky Internet Security which I bought as part of the Premium edition of Parallels (since I was so impressed)

Installed my favourite Firefox addons:

Ad Blocker

Gmail Manager

Download Statusbar

CookieSafe

dragdropupload

Had problems with an update error in Windows Update.

Got Office 2007 Home and Student edition installed - now I'm up and running for the project that's kicking off very soon.