access Windows files from OSX without having parallels running?

Discussion in 'Parallels Desktop for Mac' started by tkjazzer, May 6, 2007.

  1. tkjazzer

    tkjazzer Member

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    Is it possible to have parallels closed and access the files written on the XP virtual parallels file/disk thing from OSX? Does the parallels shared folder only allow you to go back and forth with files when parallels is running? Thanks
     
  2. Mike@Parallels

    Mike@Parallels Hunter

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    112
    Yes, you can access your Shared Folders in Mac OS even if Parallels isnt running at the moment
     
  3. kuebler

    kuebler Member

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    62
    How does one do it from MacOS, i.e. how to find and access those files? I thought that Shared Folders can only be defined for Mac OS files to be accessed from within Windows under Parallels. I'm totally confused :confused:

    And if the above is possible, would it also be possible with Windows files on a bootcamp partition, which is defined as a Parallels' VM disk?
     
  4. darkone

    darkone Forum Maven

    Messages:
    804
    what mike means, if you setup a PSF in windows, it will save the files to your OSX partition, meaning that you can access them when not running Windows as theyre already on your OSX partition.

    Something else you can try is this.
    It will only work if your *.hdd image file is a "plain virtual hard disk". If it is not one already, then you need to convert it to one with the Parallels Image Tool.

    hdiutil attach -imagekey diskimage-class=CRawDiskImage myfile.hdd

    Since the plain image files are just iso images, then the above command will mount any filesystems that are found in the image. The example that I used for testing was a fat12 filesystem for a Dos 6.22 virtual machine that I have installed. If Mac OS X can recognize the file format, then it should get mounted. You can play around with the other hdiutil options,
    man hdiutil, for ways to alter the behavior further.
     
  5. kuebler

    kuebler Member

    Messages:
    62
    Thanks for explaining. I had thought there would be a magic way to access Windows files from within the MacOS, but in fact it is finally only accessing MacOS files from within MacOS ;)
     

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