right now, when i fire up parallels, it loads up my bootcamp partition. but on the mac os x side, the bootcamp partition is missing in the mount. i'd like to still be able to access my bootcamp partition in mac os x, such as playing music on itunes, but i can't figure out a way to both run windows 7 through parallels and also still have the mounted partition available on the mac side.
Two OS's cannot use the same partition at the same time. One of them has to be in charge of the partition - meaning that it is responsible for reading and writing to the files and the file catalog. The other OS has to ask the owning OS to read and write the files for it. In order to boot a Boot Camp partition, The Parallels virtual machine and the Windows OS needs to own the partition while they are using it which means that Parallels Desktop will unmount the partition from the Mac side before starting the virtual machine. There is an option in Configure -> Options -> Shared Folders called "Mount virtual disks to Mac OS X desktop". If this option is enabled, then Parallels Desktop will provide the Mac OS with a virtual file system of the Boot Camp partition and any other virtual hard disks when you log into Windows. This may require Parallels Tools to be installed beforehand. Click on the ? button in the Shared Folders window for more information. For example, if your virtual machine is called BootCamp and your BootCamp partition is drive letter C: in the virtual machine, then you should see on your Mac Desktop a Parallels volume called "[C] BootCamp". Note that aliases to any file on your NTFS Boot Camp partition will not point to the corresponding file on the Parallels volume. Thus it may be better in some cases to keep files on the Mac side, and share them with Windows. This can be done with the other Shared Folders options, or with the Shared Profile options.
