How to scoop the brains out of a Windows PC and dump them in your Mac in one step

In Release Candidate 3 of its Parallels Desktop Mac virtualization product, Parallels has introduced a tool that it calls Transporter. It makes the task of migrating a Windows system to a bootable Parallels Desktop virtual disk image impossibly easy once you understand how it works best.

Unlike the majority of partition cloners, Transporter doesn't require a boot floppy or CD, and it doesn't call for a directly-attached target hard drive. Transporter non-destructively migrates a partition on a running Windows host to a Parallels virtual drive image that can be booted on both Parallels Virtual Desktop for Mac and Parallels Virtual Workstation for Windows/Linux. You might say that Transporter harvests a Windows PC's brain while the donor is fully awake.

Transporter is comprised of two parts. A service called Transporter Agent installs on the Windows system (client or server) that is to be migrated into a bootable virtual disk image. Transporter will migrate non-bootable partitions as well; it will bring over all of the partitions on a host machine, turning each into a separate virtual disk, in one step. The other half of Transporter is the migration tool. This runs either on the Windows machine hosting Agent or on a Mac that shares the Windows host's subnet.

I reasoned that it would be quicker to migrate my bootable Windows partition to a non-bootable partition on the same Windows machine, so my first few efforts focused on that approach. On each try, the process aborted about a third of the way through with a generic, unhelpful error message and no entry in Windows' event log. I set the system's drives to verify and remap bad sectors on reboot and tried again. The migration still failed at the same point, and the Transporter Agent service locked up and forced a system reboot.

Finally, with little expectation of success, I used Transporter's over-the-network migration. This succeeded in creating a bootable image on my Mac on the first try, but that's only a third of the way home. It had to boot, and it had to work exactly like the physical Windows host. With fingers crossed, I pointed Parallels at the just-created image and clicked the Play button. Not only did it boot quickly and smoothly (faster than the original PC), it booted with no errors, no services that wouldn't load, no weirdness with network connections. It wasn't an approximation of the PC I had just cloned, it was that PC.

Parallels keeps making its product better and better, and it hasn't charged for an upgrade yet. If Parallels isn't rolling in dough, it deserves to be.