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Parallels Desktop Lite has gone Subscription

Posted: Fri Jan 25, 2019 10:59 pm
by adespoton
The topic says it all.

After sticking with VirtualBox for years because it's open source and well documented, last year I moved my VMs to Parallels Desktop Lite because I was getting frustrated with the little things (no clipboard support, lack of custom screen resolutions, inability to easily reclaim slack space on the images, difficult file transfer, etc.).

And wouldn't you know it -- this week I started getting prompts from an auto-updated PDL that in order to use my VMs I'd have to sign up for an annual subscription. I quickly used Time Machine to revert back to the previous version of the software, but the writing's on the wall.

So. Before going down that route, I made sure that there was a process to convert Parallels VMs back to VirtualBox VMs should something like this ever happen, and tested moving the VMs back and forth.

Guess what? The current process (use the Parallels conversion tool to revert to Parallels simple HD and import that into VBox) no longer seems to work under 10.14.

Does anyone know of a currently working method of getting a Parallels Desktop Lite sparse disk image back into vdi, vhd or vmdk format?

Re: Parallels Desktop Lite has gone Subscription

Posted: Fri Jan 25, 2019 11:35 pm
by mabam
I tried converting a regular Parallels VM to VirtualBox one a while ago. It was more for fun so I don't remember exactly. But I think it is possible to import the Parallels VM using an evaluation copy of VMware Fusion (or some conversion tool from VMware?) and export to one of the formats you mentioned. I'm not sure though, but it might be worth a try.

EDIT:
I just googled and recognised a site I also found back then: https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/11 ... Virtual-Bo
I couldn't make use of this procedure as the most recent version of Windows I have access to is XP. But maybe it's an option for you.
However, a crucial point seems to be to manually remove Parallels Tools first.

Re: Parallels Desktop Lite has gone Subscription

Posted: Sat Jan 26, 2019 5:38 am
by adespoton
Yeah; I'm XP only too. I always snapshot my VMs so I have pre-tools images. I'm starting to think it might be easier to just start from scratch and export the files from within Parallels via sharing.