How to Import a VMWare image into Parallels

I spent ages reading around on the web for the best and easiest way to import a VM Ware vm into Parallels. Parallels Transporter is an option, but it requires the guest VM to be running, which may not be useful if it's a downloaded appliance image or whatever.

The answer is frightfully simple (although hard to find).

1. Launch Parallels.
2. File -> Open, and select the VM Ware image.
3. Save.

Done, converting. It'll take a while, this image is big. Let's see how it goes...

Hard Disk recovery

Just the other day I had a hard drive "stop mounting" with this type of message:

Disk Utility was no help. So I took it to a friend who has Disk Warrior. Again no luck.

After some research into other products, I saw that Data Rescue II by Pro Soft Engineering had a demo version. Download away.

Seems that it's a great product. At first it found no files - but I was trying to scan the partition. When I scanned the whole drive (not just the partition that wasn't mounting), then it provided a list of files for me to recover to another hard drive!

One interesting part of their philosophy is that recovery is a read-only operation. This is great because it prevents anything from being further corrupted by a repair gone wrong.

So now I'll be buying a copy and another 200+GB drive to recover my data onto.

Thanks Pro Soft Engineering for a great product.

On thing is odd though... why is it called Data Rescue II version 1.2? Wouldn't it just be version 2.2? :)

ADSL but only 1

We finally have an ADSL connection at home.

Our mobile broadband has been pretty good. It has similar specs, which is great to achieve over mobile network, but the ping time and responsiveness of the service was terrible.

I guess that's an advantage to using a real (good) ISP than a phone company.

3 Mobile Broadband

Today we got a 3 mobile broadband USB modem.

So far it works great. Here's our speed we're getting initially:



1224 kbit/s download is not too bad. It's no adsl2 or cable modem speeds, but given the crap we're going through at the moment getting a hardwired connection this interim solution might be what we keep!