Support for Virtual and Physical Drives

This section lists the types of disks that can be used by Parallels virtual machines and provides information about basic operations you can perform on these disks.

Supported Types of Hard Drives

Parallels virtual machines can use virtual hard drives, Boot Camp partitions, or physical drives as their hard disks.

Virtual Hard Drives

The capacity of a virtual hard drive can be set from 100 MB to 2 TB. When you create a virtual machine, the disk is created in an expanding format, which means that you can continue installing applications and downloading movies, music, etc. The disk will grow in size proportionally.

Boot Camp Partitions

With Parallels Desktop, you can choose how to use your Boot Camp Windows XP (or later) operating system: to boot in it natively (via Boot Camp) or in a virtual machine (via Parallels Desktop). A Boot Camp Windows partition can be used as a bootable disk or as a data disk in Parallels virtual machines. For detailed information, see Using Boot Camp with Parallels Desktop.

Physical Drives

Parallels Desktop allows you to connect physical drives directly to virtual machines as internal disks. When connected this way, physical drives work faster than via USB. You can either boot virtual machines from such drives or connect them as secondary and work with the drive data.

Optical Drives and Disc Images

Parallels Desktop can access real drives and images of CD/DVD/BD discs.

Parallels Desktop has no limitations on using multi-session CD/DVD discs. A virtual machine can play back audio CDs without any limitations on copy-protected discs.

If your Mac has a recording optical drive, you can use it to burn optical discs from a virtual machine.

Parallels Desktop supports disc images in the ISO, CUE, and CCD formats.

Note: DMG disk images made with macOS Disk Utility are also supported by Parallels Desktop. When creating such an image, make sure you create a read-only and uncompressed image without any encryption.