Error Message when accessing external hard drive from parallels

When I got a mac, I had parallels installed since I am was previously a regular PC user. I reformatted my external hard drive to FAT32 to be able to read and write onto the hard drive from both the mac and parallels side. This has been working fine for the past couple months, but now all of a sudden when I go to "My Computer" through the parallels desktop, the icon for my external hard drive has a red "X" next to it. When I click on it I get the error message:

X:\ refers to a location that is unavailable. It could be on a hard drive on this computer, or on a network. Check to make sure that the disk is properly inserted, or that you are connected to the internet or your network, and then try again. If it still cannot be located, the information might have been moved to a different location.

The hard drive is completely accessible from the mac side, however. Therefore I know it is not a problem with the hard drive just some reading format from my parallels vm. I am connected to internet, the disk is "properly inserted" since I can read it from the mac side, but I do not understand how to make sure I am connected to my network. I've never had to do anything before to ensure that. I don't remember what drive letter my hard drive always was on the parallels side (I'm assuming the Mac side decides this), but even when I try to go to disk management on parallels I cannot locate the hard drive to change the letter drive path.

Please help!!