I am writing this guide because I couldn’t find a working solution to the problem where you might want to clone a complete installation of Mac OS X on a physical hardware Mac to a Parallels virtual machine. In order to do that you would need to take full DMG image of the whole hard drive. Most solutions out there suggest that Parallels should automatically prompt you to conver the DMG file to its .HDD format when you add it to the VM, so you should try that first. However, that method did not work for me.
Before trying this method, you should also try to take a complete Time Machine backup and then try to restore it on to the VM. If time machine backup / restore method doesn’t work, follow this guide. Unfortunately it didn’t work for me either. Before trying this method you would need an external hard drive that is bigger in size than the disk space you have used. This guide was written assuming that you will be taking the installation of an old Mac and putting it inside a VM on your new mac. However, it should also work if you want to reinstall OS X on the same box (but I haven’t tested it this way).
1) Plug the external hard drive into the old mac
2) Turn on the old Mac while pressing multiple times Cmd + R during start up, in order to enter the start up recovery options
3) Choose Disk Utility
2) Take an image of the whole hard drive and save it as a .DMG file on the external hard drive
3) Once you have your DMG on the external hard drive, unplug the hard drive, restart the old mac and plug in the hard drive into your new mac.
4) Copy the DMG file into a folder somewhere on to your new mac (For example in “Documents”)
5) Mount it (by double clicking the copied DMG file). Let the system verify if it can open the image before it mounts it (dont skip verification – it might take some time depending on the size of your drive)
6) Optimal: Browse the files to make sure you are happy all your files are there
7) Unmount it
5) On your old mac: open parallels (If both your old mac and new mac have the exact same version of Mac OS X, you should use your new mac instead)
6) Create a new VM installing Mac OS from the recovery partition
7) You should now have a virtual machine which has a clean, working version of Mac OS that is exactly the same as the OS X version on your old mac.
8) If you used your old mac, copy the VM to your new mac (Documents/Parallels). On the new mac choose “add existing VM” and add the clean Mac OS from the old mac
10) Open the settings of the VM
12) Click the Add (“+”) sign and choose hard drive.
13) Create a new blank hard drive which is bigger in size than the disk space used in the the DMG file and make sure it is expandable (dont worry if your old hard drive is bigger than your new one – just make sure you have enough space to cover the used disk space)
14) Turn on the VM and go into the clean Mac OS installation
14) Open the Disk Utility app
17) Click File, Open Disk Image
18) Go to the Parallels shared folders
19) Find your copied DMG file and open it
20) You should now have your old hard drive mounted into your clean installation VM
21) Unfortunately, doing a recovery to the empty disk from the disk utility did not work for me here. For that reason I went out and looked for a 3rd party solution. I used Carbon Disk Cloner. You can get a free trial from their official website bombich.com
22) Install Carbon Disk Cloner inside your VM and open it. Choose the source to be your mounted disk image and destination to be you blank hard drive
23) Click “Clone”
24) Once the clone completes, turn off your VM
25) Go into the VM settings and delete the clean installation hard drive without moving files to trash (by clicking the “-” sign). Make sure you leave only what was the blank HDD
26) Boot up the machine – you should now have your old installation working
27) Install parallels tools (from the Parallels Action menu on the top)
28) Optimal: If you are happy that everything is working you should backup up your VM (you can delete the copy you made in step 8)
29) Optimal: After you have backed up your VM you can delete the clean install OS hard drive to free up disk space (go to Documents/Parallels/ and right click on the VM, select “Show Package contents”)
30) Optimal: Delete the DMG file to free up space