I'm running parallels desktop 8 on an imac with OS X Mountain Lion, and with Windows XP Professional as a guest OS. On my other windows machines, my iphone 4 shows up in Windows Explorer and is recognized by iphone-related software (itunes, copytrans, etc). No so with the virtual machine in Parallels. It appears under devices/usb, but when I check apple iphone, it never does get recognized in Win XP. I have looked for a solution online, completely without success. I found a lot of old threads complaining about the same issue, but no answers (other than things like "this has been fixed in Parallels 4, so get the latest update", etc). Does anyone have any insight on how to make this happen? I realize the apple OS isn't releasing it to the Windows side, but what can be done about it? I hate to keep the old Windows machine going just for this one issue!
problem solved I contacted Parallels support about this. They did a remote session with me. They re-installed iTunes & associated software on the XP side (which I don't believe was what solved the problem, but it was a valid first step), then checked device manager & found an unidentified USB controller (yellow "?" beside it) that they guessed was really the iPhone. After removing that unknown controller and scanning for changes, the iphone was found as a new device by the XP OS and the drivers loaded properly. The iPhone is now found by iPhone-related software on the Windows XP side! Yay! A note: Windows Explorer now "sees" the iphone under My Computer, but if I try to look at the directory it crashes ("Windows Explorer encountered an unexpected error and must close..."). I'm not too upset by this because I can now use the other iPhone-related software on the XP side.
