Sharing a C: drive between 2 VMs

Hello there- does anyone know if it is possible to share the virtual c drive of one VM with a second VM? For example, I created one Windows XP VM on my mac and it created the virtual C: drive where my windows software specific data are stored. I have now created a second VM with a different version of my primary windows software (ArcGIS 10), and rather than duplicating the 140GB of ArcGIS data I have on the first VM’s C drive, is there a way to share those data between the 2 VMs?

Retrieval rates on external drives are ridiculously slow with some of my big datasets, so that is not really an option at this time.

Similarly, is there a way to access a VM's C drive from a bootcamp Windows partition? I don’t have a bootcamp windows install at this point, but I am considering it for testing purposes.

Thanks

 

Go to Virtual Machine -> Configure -> Hardware. Press [+] to add a hard disk. Choose existing disk image, go to the first VM's .pvm folder and inside that, select the .hdd.

You will not be able to use both virtual machines at the same time.

I don't think there's a way to mount a .hdd in Windows. Parallels Desktop for Windows doesn't seem to have a Parallels Mounter like the Mac OS version does (I couldn't find any mention in the documentation). If the virtual hard disk were a fixed size disk, then maybe you could find a third party utility that could mount it.

 

that is so simple! I knew there had to be a way. User-based forums rule! Thanks for the speedy answer.