MaFUSE, Bootcamp and FAT32 USB 2.0 drives...
 

I have ben able to consistently replicate a problem with Parallels 3.0, Bootcamp 1.2 and the presence of MacFUSE and an external USB 2.0 FAT 32 disk.

Problem 1 - if OSX is using MacFUSE to mount NTFS partitions (Vista on Bootcamp) Parallels performance slows to a crawl. I have tried un-installing MacFUSE several times, I've even gone as far as wiping the OSX partition and re-installing the OS from scratch - the result is always the same - if MacFUSE is present Parallels performance slows to a crawl.

Problem 2 - my external USB FAT32 disk has to be "not plugged into the USB port" in order for Parallels to boot my Vista Bootcamp partition - otherwise I get an error stating that Parallels found more than one partition and that my bootcamp configuration is "non-standard". If I un-plug (unmounting it is not enough) the USB 2.0 disk then Parallels starts fine. I can then plug in the USB disk, give access to it to Parallels and everything works fine.

I'm curious if anyone else has run into this...


Walter
p.s. Problem 2 was present with Parallels 2.x as well - it does NOT occour if I have Windows XP on my Bootcamp partition - just with Vista...

Just FYI, Parallels 3.0 installs MacFUSE 0.3.0 silently. It's not that MacFUSE itself is the problem, but NTFS-3G driver might not be getting along with Parallels so well. Then there's the problem of the old versions of NTFS-3G driver having horrible performance bottleneck... what version are you using?

What exactly is MacFUSE being used for, and can we utilise it outside of Parallels or would that require another copy of MacFUSE installed (which is already at 0.4 IINM)