Noob question - have an NTFS partition show up in Win 7 as a "drive"

R

RWTech

Junior Member
Brand new user to both a Mac and Parallels, so forgive what I hope is a silly question.

I have a new Mac that I have installed both Paragon NTFS and Parallels. I would like to be able to hare my NTFS partitions (external drives, mostly) show up in my Win7 Ultimate VM as an actual hard drive, rather than a shared folder from "psf". This seems to cause issues with file indexing (I want to have several of my "libraries" such as documents on one of these partitions rather than the built in libraries within the VM). The only way I could come close is to connect them as "boot camp" partitions, but that only worked for one drive, and one of the externals has 2 partitions, and everytime I reboot it goes missing and I have to reconfigure. Also, having these "boot camp" connections seems to cause issues with suspending the VM.

Is there a simple way to have an NTFS partitions appear to the VM as a normal physical hard drive other than what I am doing?

Thanks, and again, my apologies for the very "noob" nature of this question. YEARS of Windows usage, and only just starting with the Mac & Parallels.
 
Boot Camp is one method.

Another might be to put the drives in a USB enclosure and connect them to the virtual machine via USB.

If it's possible for Windows to do file indexing for network drives (google: file indexing network drive), and you can enable file sharing on your Mac for NTFS partitions, then you could try connecting to the NTFS partition on the Mac from the virtual machine using normal file sharing instead of psf.

Boot Camp should work for all drives/partitions that are FAT or NTFS. What is the output from "diskutil list" and which partitions from the list don't work? Parallels needs to unmount the partitions before it can let the virtual machine take control of them. Partitions cannot be unmounted if they have opened documents. Use the "lsof" command in Terminal.app to find out.

Parallels selects Boot Camp partitions by disk and slice (partition) number (e.g. disk0s3) but these numbers do not stay the same after each startup. Parallels needs to change their code to use some other method for disk identification. It's a long standing issue. I'm not sure why they don't address it. Maybe their QA only uses iMacs that only have a single internal drive.
 
"Parallels needs to change their code to use some other method for disk identification. It's a long standing issue. I'm not sure why they don't address it. Maybe their QA only uses iMacs that only have a single internal drive."

and therein lies my problem - it would all work if I didn't have to "re-connect" each NTFS partition each time I reboot the machine. It looks like I'm doing everything that is possible (apparently Windows 7 also is not really great at indexing network drives, based on said google search)...

Thanks for the tip! Yeah, what I'm doing would work fine if they had a different way of identifying those ntfs partitions that didn't change every boot (I think it's specifically the ones that are on drives that have multiple partitions)..
 
Connecting NTFS partitions straight to virtual machine is not possible in Parallels Desktop.
There is such function in Parallels Server, but this is a separate product, which is more powerful and more expensive. And usually used with different purpose.
Parallels Desktop can only let you to connect Hard Drives to VM via USB (another way - network drive), but PD is a product for every day use and just not suppose to support such options.
 
Contrary to what's been said, I think it's actually possible to connect an NTFS partition directly...

Try this:
Have the NTFS disk/partition connected to the computer.
In the VM add another virtual disk.
In the 'Source' select the Bootcamp partition via the HDD brand.

Caveat: This might not work after reboot if there are more than 2 disks connected to the computer because of the awful way Parallels enumerates drives.

YanaYana, the reason "it's for everyday use" doesn't make any sense.
 
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OK, i'd rephrase it: in case you need some additional functionality which is not supported in Parallels Desktop - you are always welcome to upgrade to Parallels Server.
 
What the users/customers are showing is that this feature in particularly seems quite useful/needed to a wide array of customers that wouldn't be willing to pay such a premium for the Server version.

And I personally think that such feature wouldn't hurt the Parallels Server niche market.

This is more a 'political/sales' issue than it is technical and I don't expect that you, Yanayana, being more of a technician and not exactly a PR representative to be able to answer that directly, but perhaps, pass the message.
 
You are right, but all i wanted to say is PD does not support this option officially. You can try some workarounds but there is no guarantee it would work.
 
:)

I just made the feature request in the appropriate forum section.
 
Yes this would indeed be a great new feature!

BTW, the "changing disk numbers" (it is Mac OS X that assigns them, isn't it?) problem is common to all virtualizers, at least AFAIK...
 
Doesn't matter if it's the OS or Parallels, if it's an unreliable method, another method should be used. Like the hardrive's unique serial number.
 
YanaYana said:
You are right, but all i wanted to say is PD does not support this option officially. You can try some workarounds but there is no guarantee it would work.
Click to expand...

Parallels doesn't support using Boot Camp partitions? That makes no sense.

Specimen is right. There's all sorts of static disk information that can be used to identify a partition. See the "diskutil info" command for some. Every partition has a Volume UUID. Every disk with an MBR has a disk signature. You could use partition start and size also along with disk size. Internal disks have a Device Location property (e.g. "Bay 1, 2, 3, or 4"). USB disks have a Location ID. FireWire disks have a GUID.

I have 4 hard disks inside my Mac Pro. The startup disk rarely appears as disk0. It could be disk2 during one boot, and disk3 the next. This means the disk number should not be used as an identifier.
 
Yeah, well, we users think PD should, and the fact PS does just means there's no technical impediment to that, which kind of makes me angry to see it so clearly stated that it's just marketing/sales limitation, considering the price of PS no one will buy it just for this feature, PS only makes sense in a Server to multiple clients environment.

Don't expect customers to just accept the fact that their product is artificially limited. I understand the sales reasoning behind this, but when the cat is out of the bag it makes the company look like a weasel.
 
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YanaYana said:
Read conversation carefully: PD does not support real Hard Drive connection to virtual machine. Parallels Server does. http://download.parallels.com/psfm4/pmc-guides/Parallels_Server_for_Mac_Management_Guide/30264.htm
Click to expand...

That documentation talks about adding generic SCSI devices to Parallels. I guess it works like USB so that Parallels takes over the device completely and sends SCSI commands directly to the device. SCSI devices include hard disks, DAT drives (Tape), Scanners, etc.

Most regular desktop Mac users don't have any SCSI devices and so don't require the Generic SCSI feature. The Boot Camp virtual hard disk feature is all we need to get partitions to appear as real hard disks in Parallels. What we want is for the Boot Camp virtual hard disk feature to work better especially across Mac reboots.
 
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