Parallels and External Hard Drives (HFS+, NTFS)

I'm considering purchasing Parallels 3 but I have a few concerns regarding its capabilities.

1. Have the USB 2.0/External Hard Drive issues been resolved?
I want to run MixMeister, a Windows only BPM scanning program, on my MP3 collection, which resides on an HFS+ formatted external hard drive. Will parallels be able to perform this task properly?

2. Can I use parallels to access NTFS formatted external USB hard drives in the windows and/or mac environment?

3. A previous build of Parallels had issues when booting from Boot Camp partitions. Has this been resolved 100%? I do not want to risk trashing my Boot Camp partition by running Parallels.

 

I've got an external USB drive and it's easy to access in Mac or WinParallels (v3 XP sp2).

Caveats:
- Selecting the USB device does not do a clean 'unmount' it simply detaches it from the Finder, just like pulling the cable out.
- Parallels will not start (or restart) a virtual machine with more than 1 DOS volume visible to the machine. (Must be unmounted and physically disconnected).

So long as you have the external drive disconnected before you start, everything's fine.

-matt

 

In other words, the issue hasn't gone away then. Parallels used to be able to start a VM with an external USB drive connected (a couple of versions ago now).

Re the clean "unmount", once the VM is running, and you plug in a USB drive (and don't use autoconnect), you can unmount the drive from OSX, and then tell Parallels to mount it for the VM - saves the "You idiot - you didn't unmount the drive before removing it" message that OSX gives you (yeah, ok, it doesn't actually say that, but that's what it means )

If the drive is HFS+ (or NTFS for that matter), why not use a firewire cable (if the case can take one) - saves the USB hassles! I gave up on USB connected drives, and I'm in a much happier place now.

 

In my experience, FW drives behave exactly the same as USB. (My drive is both, and I get the same problems whether it's connected to FW or USB bus.)

 

Kind of similar question. I've got a Firewire drive I need to mount as I

How do I do that?

(if possible please make the expanation as simple as possible, I'm new to Parallels.)

Thanks!

-=Tim=-

 

La Cie external Hard Drive

I'm using Parallels 3 on Boot Camp and I cannot connect my external HFS+ hard drive (as well with USB as with Firewire). When I go into the device menu and connect it with usb, it is harshly disconnected from mac os but it seems fine: windows tells me my new device is ready to use but I can't see it anywhere... I have MacDrive installed on Windows and it works when i'm under boot camp... Is there something to do or it just won't work?
Thanks