USB hard drive as Windows drive D?

Would like to use an old Windows XP drive as an external drive to access my programs on this disc in Parallels. It shows up as a network drive only, which doesn't allow program use, only files. Anyway I can set this up to be recognized as a drive D in Windows? Using Parallels 3.0 and Windows XP Home with a MacMini Core 2 duo.

 

Is it a Parallels image? It seems not, so I would suggest you first to create an .hdd image of that disk using Parallels Transporter, so that it would be possible to mount the disk either as a D: drive or create a new virtual machine based on this virtual hard disk image.

To add the hard disk image as a D: drive you would need to access Parallels Configuration Editor and add it from there.
To create a new virtual machine based on existing hard disk image, use the custom installation mode.

 

I am able to get Windows under Parallels to recognize this as a D drive and run all programs, but only if I plug it in when in Windows VM. It gets recognized as a USB mass storage device and mounts in Windows as drive D. However, it when I restart my Mac and go back into Windows, its no longer there as drive D, only as a networked drive. Anyway to get this USB hard drive recognized everytime I start Windows?

 

The difference is that when you do not connect a USB device directly to the virtual machine it is still being recognised in the virtual machine as a network drive due to the Parallels SmartMount feature.
Whenever you connect the USB directly to the virtual machine it is being recognised as an USB drive.
So, in order to always connnect as an USB drive you would need either to specify that all USB devices plugged in should be connected directly to the virtual machine (Configure -> USB) or specify that exactly this device should always be connected directly (Preferences -> USB). However, it is important to mention that an USB device attached directly to virtual machine would be unaccessible by the Mac side (with the exception of a shared folders).

 

Not sure how to get this Windows XP drive recognized as a D drive, its still a USB networked drive. When I go into Transporter and click on the Windows XP drive (its USB), the option to open it is not active. Does Transporter change the boot setup of my Windows drive if I can manage to image it as .hdd? Will I still be able to put this drive back in my Dell and it will boot and run like before? Alos, under either USB configuration editor or Parallels Preferences, I don't see any option to select this drive to always be recognized as a D drive in my VM. Any suggestions?