Oct 22, '09 07:30:39AM • Contributed by: patmuk
Actually, no virtualization program allows that -- to hinder the unattended user from messing up his Boot Camp file system. If you suspend a Boot Camp installation which was started in a virtual machine while running OS X, and then reboot into Boot Camp without OS X, your file system can take unrepairable damage, as some data might still exist in the memory that was supposed to be written to disk. So be warned -- always shut down the virtualized Boot Camp OS before rebooting in native Boot Camp! Nothing bad can happen if you just restart Parallels and resume a suspended OS, which is much faster than to boot it.
That being said, now comes the tip. First set up your Boot Camp installation as a virtual machine in Parallels, using the normal setup wizard. Parallels creates an entry in the filesystem (default location is ~/Documents/Parallels/) that ends with .pvm. With the virtual machine shut down, Go to the Virtual Machine » Configure menu in Parallels, and navigate there to Hardware » Hard Disk 1.
The option Boot Camp Partition is activated; change it to Image File and browse to your Parallels configuration file, normaly located in ~/Documents » Parallels » your_name.pvm. This file is actually a folder -- inside you will find another file/folder ending with .hdd. Select this (just the folder, not the contents), and voila! Parallels now allows to suspend your virtual machine, as it is tricked into believing you are running a normal OS from a file, not Boot Camp.
This works with Windows XP, Windows 7 in OS X 10.5 and 10.6, maybe even in more configurations, but those, at least, are my well-tested set ups.
