How do I get a clone of my Sierra machine to run as a Virtual machine in Parallels?

[Poncho]

I have my Sierra system Carbon Copy cloned to an external SSD.
I downloaded Parallels. I want Parallels to open the clone of my whole system as a Virtual Machine.
It won't do this.
So I told Disk Utility to create a bootable .dmg of my whole system to a second external SSD.
After churning away for about six hours it failed with the message: Operation failed with status 49168

Tried this again and let it run overnight. Same result.

So I how do I get Parallels to to open the clone of my whole system as a Virtual Machine?

It won't even download Sierra inside a new virtual machine from the recovery partition because this process appears to be broken because Sierra is so out of date.

 

[Boyd01]

I created a Sierra VM on my 2018 Mini when I was running Catalina, it's now running under Monterey. Struggled with this myself and tried lots of things. In the end, I did something very simple which should work for you too. Choose the option to create a new VM from a disk image and choose your Sierra clone as the source (assuming that your clone is bootable).

Surprisingly, this only took a few seconds and it worked. However, it created a VM that booted from the external Carbon Copy clone, just like a real Mac booting from an external disk. I could have just used that, but the external disk would always have to be connected. The VM also had a blank "internal disk", so I simply cloned the external SSD to the blank "internal" virtual disk (I needed to use the appropriate legacy version of Carbon Copy on the VM to accomplish this).

That took a little while, but when completed I just set the VM to boot from the "internal" disk and everything has been fine ever since, booting from the virtual disk without needing to connect the external drive.

 

[velocityg4]

Just create a fresh Sierra install with the VM. Then migrate your data into the VM and delete or archive the original.

 

[Poncho]

Thanks both for your help. No luck with Boyd01's method. Parallels just doesn't seem to consider my bootable clone to be a .dmg. I understand velocity's method but when I get to the Utilities option when trying to do a fresh Sierra install and click migrate from, say Time machine, it can't find my Time Machine back-up on the network. At the moment I can't get any further than the screenshot I've attached.

 

[Boyd01]

That is odd. I created both a Sierra and a Mountain Lion VM using that technique. I used an external USB SSD that was a bootable clone of my 2013 MacBook Air (Sierra) and 2012 Mini (Mountain Lion). They showed up under the "Install image file" option in your screenshot. These external SSD clones had been tested and would actually boot those two Macs.

But I did this in on my 2018 Mini back in 2020, running Catalina and an older version of Parallels so maybe that's the difference. You haven't told us what machine you're using for this. Just assuming it's an Intel Mac of some sort. If it's Apple Silicon then all bets are off. 🤣

 

[Boyd01]

FWIW, I just tried again quickly using a clone of Mountain Lion that I still have handy. Didn't work for me either this time. Sorry...

 

[Poncho]

Hi, thanks for getting back. I'm running an iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2017) and Parallels 15. iMac is running Sierra. I need to run OSX Sierra because I need to run both Adobe CS3 and Adobe CS6 for work clients. Both programs will only run on Sierra. However, being on Sierra means that Safari 12.1.2 is now pretty useless (I can't even see my Emails in iCloud unless I upgrade) and many sites no longer support 12.1.2. So my idea was to see if I could import my current system into a VM on Parallels and see how I got along. If it worked OK then I was going to upgrade my iMac to the newest OS X it could take and run my Sierra system in Parallels in Coherence mode. It's no big deal. Just looks like I'm stuck on Sierra. And if my iMac gives up the ghost I will find a secondhand one of similar vintage.

 

[Boyd01]

OK, played with this a bit more and think it may still work but don't have time to troubleshoot. If I have the external SSD with Mountain Lion connected and create a new Parallels VM, then *double-click* "Install Windows or another OS from a DVD or image file" I get this screen.

It's confusing, because it implies a USB stick with MacOS on it. However, that is definitely my Mountain Lion clone on an external USB SSD.

I was able to create the VM but got a string of alerts about needing access to the external SSD (which I allowed) yet it hung during the boot process on some sort of EFI screen. Could pause/resume but couldn't shut down, it was just hung. Just don't have time to do further troubleshooting, but at least it recognized the clone and created the VM, so I suspect I could get it working. Maybe.

FWIW, here's a post I made about this back in 2020

https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...app-work.2244511/?post=28644648#post-28644648

[edit]Haha... looking closer at that three year old post... I was actually responding to you at the time! 🤣

 

[Poncho]

Ha ha ha. You're right. You did answer my question three years ago. I cancelled the order for the 2019 Macbook Pro after reading the post at the end from another poster. I'll have a go at the *double-click* method now

 

[Boyd01]

During the process of creating that VM, I believe there was a button to change the settings before the VM is created but I skipped that step. Thinking back, that might have been the problem. You can configure disks, etc. in the settings there instead of just using the defaults. I think it was creating a really small disk, like 8gb or something.

On the Sierra VM I've been using for the last three years, I have 4gb RAM, 2 processors and 36gb disk space. IIRC, I created it with 64gb of virtual disk but later reclaimed unused space.

 

[Poncho]

If I go the double click route I get the boot screenshot attached, if I try to make a new Sierra VM from scratch I get the second screenshot attached. If the situation in the second screenshot was happening on my iMac proper I would go into Terminal and set the clock on the iMac back to a time when the Apple server would sign off the Sierra installation but can't do that within the virtual machine.

 

[Poncho]

A short update, with pics to keep you entertained.

I thought I'd go for the clean install of Sierra by turning the clock back inside the virtual machine using the Terminal option in the Utilities you are offered. Thought I'd cracked it, as the OS started to install. Then 339 seconds before lift off it threw me another error message. Tried this three times and the same, always at 339 seconds. Anyway, I'm now going to make a Time Machine back up onto a separate SSD and see if I can get the beginnings of the Sierra installation to import from that.