Parallels 4 and external drive

I've managed to get parallels 4 working (after a bit of hassle) with the main boot camp partition. My problem now is that I can't add my windows partition on my external hard drive (like I did by manually editing the .pvs in 3.0) because when I add it and press ok it gives the error:
'A disk configuration error has occurred. Make sure that you have read/write permissions for the disk.'
What shall I try?

 

same problem

I'm having problems with Parallels 4.0 recognizing my WD passport portable HD. On 3.0 it picked it up just fine when I clicked under the usb options however with 4.0 it won't even list it. any suggestions on how to fix this?

 

Hello nrbrook.
Please send problem report to Parallels, and post report ID to this thread.
( menubar: Help->Report a problem )

 

For some reason Parallels can't send an error report, it can't connect. There shouldn't be anything stopping it connect, but anyway. I've attached the problem report xml as a .txt.
I've tried running chkdsk which found no problems.

 

This problem is still an issue in build 3810, and it is very disappointing that I have not even received a reply. Please provide assistance.

 

it sould be recognized on Mac OS first
Stop Parallels Desktop and check in mac OS Terminal
ioreg -p IOUSB -l

can you see your device?
if not, it is Mac OS

 

It mounts in OS X, however it is a firewire 800 drive so does not appear when this command is run. It's volume name is '.Windows extended' so I can see it in the finder sidebar but not on the desktop. Parallels recognises the partition as a windows partition because it only allows the 50gb windows partition for selection (there is a larger hfs volume co-existing on this MBR formatted drive). The partition mounts successfully under boot camp.

 

So it is firewire, and it will not appear in the list of USB devices,and you cannot attach it to VM
as firewire devices cannot be attached

 

Why? I could do this in parallels 3 by editing the .pvs...so was version 4 a downgrade?

 

You need to see it in list of the drive when you create Boot Camp partition

 

I do. As I said in my post, I add the volume as a boot camp partition but when I click ok on the main configuration window it produces that error.

 

Please post here output from
diskutil list
in Terminal

 

Nicks-Mac:~ nick$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *232.9 Gi disk0
1: EFI 200.0 Mi disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Nick's Mac 206.9 Gi disk0s2
3: Microsoft Basic Data .Windows 25.7 Gi disk0s3
/dev/disk1
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *465.8 Gi disk1
1: EFI 200.0 Mi disk1s1
2: Apple_HFS Leopard 208.0 Gi disk1s2
3: Apple_HFS Time Machine 257.3 Gi disk1s3
/dev/disk2
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: FDisk_partition_scheme *465.8 Gi disk2
1: Apple_HFS Media 415.9 Gi disk2s1
2: Windows_NTFS .Windows extended 49.9 Gi disk2s2

 

This is really starting to bug me, quite disappointed at the lack of actual support here from parallels, will definitely be considering switching to VMWare Fusion for future versions.

Firstly to anyone reading this from fresh, I'll recap my situation and provide some technical details.

I have Parallels 4.0.3810 working fine with a Windows XP Bootcamp Partition. I have an NTFS partition on a MBR partition scheme formatted external Firewire 800 disk. On this disk there is only one other partition, which is HFS+. When using bootcamp the partition is mounted by windows. I want to add the NTFS partition on the external drive to parallels so it is mounted in windows.

Diskutil list:

By reading around on the forums I've managed to pick up a few things about manually editing the configuration, which in a truly backwards step seems to be considerably harder than in Parallels 3.0.

So while some have been able to manually edit the DiskDescriptor.xml for the one disk with two bootcamp partitions on, I've not been able to figure out how I could do the same for two partitions on different disks. Also I don't know how to get the partition inspector from rEFIt to look at the external drive instead of the internal only.

What I've thought so far:
1. Duplicate and rename the existing hard drive .hdd package for the external drive
2. Reference it in config.pvs
3. Edit DiskDescriptor.xml accordingly

What I'm unsure about is all the .hdd/.hds files inside the .hdd package, and how these would be created for the external drive. Any ideas?