I feel SO much better now. I really did think Explorer mounted the disk, I just wasn't at a computer which had PD installed so I could not verify it until now.
Mounting my XP hdd file in Parallels and then looking in the Volumes folder you see the following:
xxxx: wingdo /Volumes $ l
total 8
drwxrwxrwt 4 root admin 136B Jul 28 16:50 .
drwxr-xr-x 35 root wheel 1K Jul 27 20:42 ..
drwxr-xr-x 3 wingdo admin 102B Jul 28 16:50 .PEVolumes
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 1B Jul 27 20:42 Macintosh HD -> /
xxxxx: wingdo /Volumes $
The .PEVolumes will have every volume mounted with Parallels Express. As you can see, it is fully mounted.
xxxxx: wingdo /Volumes/.PEVolumes/.PEVolume{35102ce5-252e-44cb-adc9-73f1ef92a18
9} $ l
total 4806636
drwxr-xr-x 1 wingdo wingdo 0B Mar 15 20:27 $Recycle.Bin
-rwxr-xr-x 1 wingdo wingdo 8K Mar 15 23:16 BOOTSECT.BAK
drwxr-xr-x 1 wingdo wingdo 0B Mar 15 23:16 Boot
drwxr-xr-x 1 wingdo wingdo 0B Nov 2 2006 Documents and Settings
drwxr-xr-x 1 wingdo wingdo 0B Jun 11 23:14 Program Files
drwxr-xr-x 1 wingdo wingdo 0B Nov 2 2006 ProgramData
drwxr-xr-x 1 wingdo wingdo 0B Jul 18 11:43 System Volume Information
drwxr-xr-x 1 wingdo wingdo 0B Mar 15 20:27 Users
drwxr-xr-x 1 wingdo wingdo 0B Jul 18 11:19 Windows
-rwxr-xr-x 1 wingdo wingdo 24B Sep 18 2006 autoexec.bat
-rwxr-xr-x 1 wingdo wingdo 428K Nov 2 2006 bootmgr
-rwxr-xr-x 2 wingdo wingdo 10B Sep 18 2006 config.sys
-rwxr-xr-x 1 wingdo wingdo 1023M Jul 18 11:04 hiberfil.sys
-rwxr-xr-x 1 wingdo wingdo 1G Jul 18 11:04 pagefile.sys
Last edited: Jul 28, 2007