Mounting a single USB drive partition?

Discussion in 'Windows Virtual Machine' started by mjdc76, Nov 20, 2014.

  1. mjdc76

    mjdc76 Bit poster

    Messages:
    1
    Sorry, this seems like it should be a basic question, so I suspect it's a dupe. But the forum search is not super helpful. Feel free to lock and point me to a better answer if one already exists.

    I am running Parallels 10.1.1 on OSX 10.10 (Yosemite), with Windows 7 as the guest OS.

    I have an external USB 2.0 hard drive. The drive has three partitions. 2 are Mac formatted, and one is a FAT32 formatted drive. The USB drive uses the MBR partition layout style.

    What I'd like to be able to do is have the FAT32-formatted partition mount on Windows, and the Mac-formatted partitions mount on OSX. Ideally, I'd be able to have it differentially mount the partitions when the drive is connected. It would be acceptable to find a solution where I'd have to re-start the guest OS to make this work.

    How can I make this work? I have no problem mounting the WHOLE drive under one OS or the other - I understand the general mechanism for mounting USB devices. But I'm at a loss to mount a single PARTITION of the drive on Windows without dragging the others along with it. Please advise?
     
  2. AlekseyM

    AlekseyM Product Expert

    Messages:
    207
    Unfortunately you can't really just connect a partition. One OS or the other has to mount the whole drive. The way I'd do it, is have it connect to the mac. Then make sure on your VM you have mount all mac drives to windows under VM configuration. You will see all the partitions across your mac and the VM, but that's just the way it works.
     

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