Seeing firewire HD in Windows

M

musigal

Junior Member
Hi. :) I'm running Parallels Desktop for Mac, build 3214.

I noticed a post about seeing a USB HD in Windows. I have a Firewire external HD that I am not seeing in Windows. I'm running Windows 2000 Professional.

I can see my external HD on the Mac side, but not on the Windows side on the desktop. The HD is partitioned mostly for Mac, but has a separate Windows side.

I've got the memory set at 192 MB, with 8000 MB for the internal hard drive. I'm running 1.25 MB of memory on my Mac and have 30.55 GB free on my Mac hard drive.

I have e-mailed support in the past with no response. I hope maybe you can help me out! Thanks!
 
Enable Windows Sharing in Mac OS, share the Firewire drive in Mac OS, and you should be able to see the drive in Windows.
 
Windows sharing is "on." Has always been "on." Can you talk me through the rest, as I don't fully understand.
 
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musigal said:
Windows sharing is "on." Has always been "on." Can you talk me through the rest, as I don't fully understand.
Click to expand...


In addition to keeping Windows Sharing on, in the Parallels Desktop devices menu, enable/open "shared folders", then look for your firewire drive and add it. it will probably appear as a folder within your mac "desktop" folder. Then enable/select it.

After that, when you launch your Windows VM, there should be a shared folders icon on your VM desktop. Open it and you should see your firewire drive.

I use this setup with PD 3214 and Win XP Pro SP2 and my LaCie firewire drive is totally accessible this way.
 
"Shared folders" is on, but the device is not listed. I went to the Parallels Shared Folders on my desktop and while it's showing everything on my Mac, it's not showing my LaCie Hard Drive--Mac or PC partitioned sides.

I have no idea what AlanH meant by "share the Firewire drive in Mac OS."

Little by little I'm learning this stuff. :)

Also how do I turn "on" smilies on this forum? I'm having a hard time finding that control panel. Thanks!
 
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musigal said:
"Shared folders" is on, but the device is not listed. I went to the Parallels Shared Folders on my desktop and while it's showing everything on my Mac, it's not showing my LaCie Hard Drive--Mac or PC partitioned sides.
Click to expand...

Once you open the shared folders feature, you need to "Add" the folder you want to share. When you click "add" it should display all the folders on your physical drive.

Go to the "desktop" folder and your LaCie (and any other folders you have on your desktop) should be listed. At that point select the LaCie for addition to your shared folders.

At least that is what I did.

As for the smiles, not sure how to turn it on or off. I just type : and the right parenthesis and it appears. :)
 
Sorry, I didn't see the subsequent discussion until now.

I don't use the Shared Folders feature in Parallels, because I tend to the view that it is too dangerous to allow Windows free access to my Mac OS X's hard drive. However, I assume others have no such paranoia, and so I left it as an exercise to establish sharing of the external hard drive.

However, here's how I did it:

Having ensured that Windows can see my OSX Home folder, either as a Network Place or as a Mapped Network Drive, I put a symbolic link to the Firewire drive in my OSX home folder. This is then available to Windows, and looks just like another folder.

I create symbolic links very simply, as I use Pathfinder instead of Finder, and Make Symbolic Link is a menu option in Pathfinder. Otherwise, you may need to create a sym-link using the Terminal. Open a Terminal window, ensure that you are in your Home directory, and type the command: ln -s "/Volumes/[your firewire drive]"
 
Hi Alan. :) Thanks for explaining, although I am not as versed as you! I am going to try the method John's talking me through, then once I get more comfortable with things, try it your way. Just a few more questions, if you don't mind.

Is Pathfinder a different software or included with Mac OS?

So the home folder would have my Mac desktop, Documents, etc., I assume. I understand that part. I don't understand the terminal info. Is this on Mac OS or Windows? Do I need Finder or Pathfinder?

The only reason I'm tying in the LaCie for Windows is to make backup copies of what few Windows files I have. I rarely use Windows for Internet surfing and e-mail (is this where your paranoia comes from, Alan? The possibility of the Mac getting a virus from Windows?).

Thanks again for all your help! :)
 
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Cool beans! :) It worked! I'm glad you told me what to do after "add," because then it made a whole lot more sense. The E: drive didn't come up on the desktop, per se, but actually I saw it listed on the side along with my HD and network. I clicked on it and voila!

Thank you, John! :) And as far as the smilies, the smilies come up in "binary" (I guess?) format, but not the graphic one. For some reason, my smilie translator on here is turned off. In time I'll figure it out.
 
Sounds like you've achieved your objective. Well done! You probably don't need my stuff now, but as you had some questions about my post, I'll fill in some answers anyway.

Pathfinder is an alternative to Finder that I've been using for years. It's third party software from CocoaTech, and has lots of extra features compared with Apple's Finder - one of which is a Make Symbolic Link menu option similar to Finder's Make Alias.

Yes, your Home folder is the one you see in the Finder window with a house icon and your user name on it. It should contain your Desktop folder plus Documents, Music, Pictures, Movies, Library ...

If you don't have PathFinder then you need to create the symbolic link to your LaCie drive another way. That's where the Terminal comes in. Terminal is like the MSDOS prompt window in Windows. It provides a command line interface to Mac OS X. It's in /Applications/Utilities/, and when you launch it you should see a window with a prompt and it should be set to your Home folder as its current directory. Mine looks like:

MacPro:~ alan$

'MacPro' is the name of my system. '~' is the abbreviation for "Home folder", telling me that's the current directory. 'alan' is my user name on the system. '$' is the command line prompt, so it's waiting for me to type a command.

OS X is unlikely to get a virus from Windows. My paranoia relates to letting Windows have open access to my entire OS X hard drive. A rogue Windows program *could* either deliberately or accidentally wipe my Mac, or do it more subtle injury. I prefer to limit the potential for damage.

... and finally, I don't see smilies, either, and I can't se any options to enable/disable them :)
 
I have a similar problem. I have a maxtor firewire external drive which was formatted in windows XP. I can read from it in both Mac and WinXP, but all of the files are read only. Therefore I cannot make changes and save with the same filename. I've tried changing the properties in windows but it doesn't work.

Suggestions?
Would reformatting the drive, either in Mac or Windows work? (Note: I need to be able to read the drive on windows only computers.)

thanks.
 
If it's NTFS formatted then it will be read-only on a Mac. Either convert it to FAT32, or reformat it for Mac HFS+ and share it from the Mac as suggested above.
 
I've reformatted as extended, journal. I think.

When I reboot, I get a disk insertion error message. When I tell it to initialize, the disk utility opens. Virtually everything is greyed out except for erase and partition/options.

The disk doesn't show up either in Finder or in windows explorer.

Suggestions?
And thanks from a mac newbie
 
What does the error message say?

In Disk Utility, does the firewire disk show up in the left hand panel listing your drives? If so, there should be a disk entry saying something like 233.8 GB Maxtor (your capacity may be different from mine) and indented under that there should be a mount point entry. Mine's called Maxtor 250, which was probably the default when it was formatted. If you highlight the mount point entry you should see a blue button in the toolbar at the top of the window and it should be called Mount or Unmount, depending on whether the volume is mounted. If it isn't mounted, click Mount to mount it. It should then appear in Finder.

It will only appear in Windows Explorer if it can be seen in Finder, and then only if you have shared it using one of the options discussed above.
 
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