Moving a Parallels Virtual Machine to a VirtualBox Virtual Machine

This is a pretty loose guide... I couldn't find a good guide online so I pieced together this from a number of sources.

In my case I backed up my Windows XP Pro Virtual Machine running in Parallels and moved it to a VirtualBox Virtual Machine. This method requires that you have your XP Pro disc, as I did not back up the entire disk... read on.

Make a backup of your entire machine using Windows Backup.

Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Backup

(Make sure you've got enough space to back this up, you may need some external storage. Keep in mind that the FAT32 file system only allows files up to 4GB, so trying to back up to your FAT32 formatted thumb drive will not work if it's larger than that. It took me a number of failed attempts before I remembered this limitation.)

Open VirtualBox and create your new virtual machine, re-install XP as you would if you were making a brand new VM.

Once that's done go to Windows Backup, this time using the restore option.... open up the backup file you created earlier, let it restore all of your files, this took about 20 minutes for my 5 gig backup. You will be asked to reboot the machine.

This is where I thought I'd screwed it up beyond repair, after trying the reboot I couldn't get the virtual machine to start, it locked on startup.

The Fix: Start Windows in Safe Mode... go to Add/Remove programs, in the list near the bottom there are quite a few Apple drivers that are installed when installing windows via boot camp. There are probably 20 or so of these. Remove all of them. You should now be able boot windows normally now.

Once I booted I again went to Add/Remove programs, and removed "Parallels Tools" and there was also still something with a BootCamp reference in there... I also removed that since I'm not using BootCamp anymore.

Somewhere in the process you will likely have to reactivate your copy of windows. Mine actually activated over the internet this time... I usually have to call to activate since I screw around installing and uninstalling this copy of windows so much.

That's it, you're done.