I have an iMac, and I can no longer access my CD drive in Mac OS 10.4.10. Every time I enter a CD in the drive, Parallels/Vista takes over the device. I tried going to Parallels>Devices>CD/DVD-ROM 1 and select disconnect, but that doesn't work. How do I switch back and forth such that one OS or the other recognizes the CD drive?
I don't know about the technical side but Isn't this something Parallels could do something about? Surely it's important that the CD drive should be available to both the Mac and parallels environment at any time? I have noticed that when I start up parallels sometimes a message comes up saying that the CD drive is not available. When it is available to be used with Windows and I want to use it on my Mac I then find that it isn't usable without disconnecting it from PD first. I don't know about anybody else but I find this irritating.
A DC/DVD drive can't be directly connected to two computers at once, which is what you are asking for, unless it's connected to a server of some kind. The best you can achieve is to host it on OS X and have its contents accessible to Windows via sharing, ie using OS X as the file server. But Windows will not treat it as an optical drive under those conditions.
