Can Snow Leopard VM on v13 see shared disk formatted as APFS on High Sierra?

I just upgraded to High Sierra and my main hard disk was reformatted to APFS. My Snow Leopard VM on an older version of Parallels Desktop can no longer connect to the main hard disk (the VM disk with the OS works fine, but I keep most of my apps and documents on the main, shared disk). I've read that older OS's will not read APFS drives on High Sierra. Does that mean I won't be able to access my main drive from my Snow Leopard VM? Or did Parallels do some magic in v13 that gives Snow Leopard the ability to see shared APFS drives on High Sierra?

 

I went ahead and upgraded to v13 with no change to being able to run programs from my High Sierra disk. I can see my Home folder on that disk and manipulate files, but it won't run applications. I'm having to install the applications directly on the VM disk (with Snow Leopard). I assume Parallels is trying to connect to the High Sierra disk with AFP, which is no longer supported (through the confusingly named APFS format).

 

I'm reopening this old thread, because I'm considering Parallels Desktop, and don't know if it will work with my configuration.

The real Mac will run under Big Sur (macOS 11.x). The virtual Mac in Parallels Desktop has to run in Sierra (macOS 10.12.6), for compatibility with older software.

The old apps in the virtual Sierra will have to access the main drive of the real Mac (APFS), through a shared folder.

Since Sierra only had "limited, experimental" support to APFS, will this work? Some tests I did running the real Mac in Catalina gave positive results, but I couldn't work for long with it. So, may I be confident that it will work without causing harm to my real Mac's drive?

Paolo

 

As a partial answer to myself: I run a Sierra VM under High Sierra. Apparently, everything works fine, and the shared folder from an APFS drive in High Sierra is accessed from Sierra. I can open and save files.

Still, I'm somewhat worried at eventual damages that could be caused by using Sierra on an APFS drive. Is Parallels taking care of translating all the read/write instructions, so there is no real access of the Sierra VM to the shared APFS drive?

Paolo

 

I don't know if this answers your question but I use a Snow Leopard VM on my Big Sur (v 11.4) Mac with the main disk formatted as APFS and Snow Leopard can read/write it just fine.

As an interesting side note, Apple (in their infinite wisdom) dropped support for their HFS file format from Catalina forward. However, I can still read those disks from my Snow Leopard VM.

 

Warner, yes, thank you, this definitely answers my question. If it works with a SL guest, not including support for APFS, it should work with Sierra. It seems that PD intercepts the disk commands and converts them to the equivalents of the host machine.

Paolo