Moving VM with XP Installed to New Mac

[Knocka]

I have been experimenting for two weeks with an iMac I bought for my kids, which I am about to give to them. I installed VM Fusion with XP. I did not activate XP, since I knew this would not be the permanent home for it. I also installed a few programs in XP, such as Outlook. I have decided to get myself a Mac. Therefore, I would like to transfer the Virtual Machine, exactly as it is, with XP intact and all the programs installed under XP intact (and data files). I assume this is possibe. Can someone provide easy instructions? I tried searching, and it looks like I can do what I want, but I did not see anything that says exactly how to do it. Thanks.

Knocka

[rcardona2k]

It's pretty easy to accomplish this. Put your existing Mac in Firewire Target mode under System Preferences > Startup Disk, then connect your current Mac to your new Mac. Your current Mac will show up as a firewire drive on the new Mac using a firewire cable. The your current Mac's drive shows up on your new Mac's desktop navigate to /Users/yourname/Documents/Virtual Machines and copy your machines to same location on your new Mac, or park them on your Desktop until you install Fusion your new Mac. Then drag the firewire drive to the Trash to unmount it. On your new Mac, double-click the VM icon to add it to your Library there. When VMware asks if you've copied or moved it, choose moved since you have not activated it.

If you need to move a Boot camp partition, I highly recommend Winclone to backup and restore. If you change the boot camp partition size between Macs, be sure to pay attention to the sizing options.

Important: you can't run exactly the same copy of Windows on the same network without conflict even if you change the machine name in My Computer properties. If you need to do this, besides the license implications are there tools that Microsoft provides to 'unclone' an exact copy like this using Sysprep or NewSid.

[Knocka]

Since I will not have the new Mac in the same location as the current one, I want to "park" the VM on a USB hard drive, and the copy it back. I assume this will work too.

Do I understand correctly that I am copying the virtual machine itself, not the enire Fusion installation? Meaning that on the new Mac, I need to install Fusion again, first, then copy the virtual machine back onto the new Mac, into the same folder it was in on the original Mac. Right?

[rcardona2k]

That's right you're copying the virtual machine "document" or bundle. You can park the machine on an external USB drive so long as it's Mac-formatted, I.e. HFS. FAT32 (PC-formatted) requires splitting the virtual disk into segments. VMware can split the disk but the Finder won't do this.

Yes you must install Fusion on the new machine with a new license for that machine and to install system components.