CD Rom access in Parallels & Mac simultaneously

I

igrover

Bit poster
Hello - new to Parallels, thinking of purchasing. I create a cdrom product for companies that runs cross-platform. I will be attending a trade show next month and will be running a demo of the cdrom live in my trade show booth. Instead of having two computers, one Mac and one Windows, I was thinking about installing Parallels and just switching back and forth.

The question I have is: is it possible to have a cdrom inserted in the Mac and be able to access the information on it simultaneously by the Mac and Parallels? Or would I have to start up Parallels, then insert the cdrom and run it in Windows, then shut down Parallels and start the process all over again on the Mac side?

Thanks for your help.
 
You can connect and disconnect the CD drive from the Parallels toolbar or menu, but you can't access a CD from both at the same time.
 
You could mount the CD on the Mac and then set it up as a shared folder in Parallels or share it using samba, but then your VM would see it as a network drive rather than a physical CD which may or may not screw things up for you.
 
You could also make an ISO of the disc, set up parallels to use the ISO, and use the real disc from the Mac.

( If you are doing a demo it might actually behoove you to use ISO's from both the Mac and parallels as a hard drive is an order of magnitude faster on seek then a hard drive. It may speed things up a bit... ;) )

EDIT: barring copy-protections of course...
 
If I understand your question dcohen, yes, at least two ways:
1) Establish a shared folder, as can normally be done between many OSes
2) Make a copy of the .hdd file that gets used (OS X won't be able to use it directly, but it'll still be a backup image of the whole "XP drive").
 
unused_user_name said:
You could also make an ISO of the disc, set up parallels to use the ISO, and use the real disc from the Mac.

( If you are doing a demo it might actually behoove you to use ISO's from both the Mac and parallels as a hard drive is an order of magnitude faster on seek then a hard drive. It may speed things up a bit... ;) )

EDIT: barring copy-protections of course...
Click to expand...


oooh, I like that idea, very clever.

The other thing you could do is make an iso, mount it on the mac, and then set up the mounted disc as a share, thus eliminating the need for the physical CD altogether
 
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