Suggested Improvements

[rsanders]

Since you have access to the boot camp partition, would it be possible to have a partition shared with the host OS? Within the guest OS, you could install a program such as macDrive, allowing windows to access a mac formatted partition.

However, this may not be possible since parallels may require exclusive rights to any partition; thus, it could not be shared with the host OS.

Thanks for a great update.
Bob

 

[misterjangles]

well, aside from using the parallels shared folder feature, if you're using bridged network mode then your host and guest will behave as if they are totally separate machines. so that means you can use any normal network sharing that you would use between two separate machines.

with OSX you can enable samba sharing and then map drives from windows. likewise you can share drives in windows and use OSX finder "connect to server"

you'll notice that in bridged mode OSX and windows will each grab their own IP from your router. for example 192.168.1.100 will be OSX and Windows will be 192.168.1.101

 

[joem]

It is not possible to have MacDrive work while OSX is running. It is not possible to share a partition at the driver level between two operating systems running at the same time. Disk corruption will result within seconds.

To share a volume, one OS has to "own" the volume and provide access to the other through its file level drivers.

When a VM is running using a bootcamp partition, the Windows low level drivers own the partition, and OSX owns the Mac partition. Currently shared folders will allow access from the VM to the OSX volume, as will sharing the volume on the network and accessing it as a network share. This concept could probably be extended, but the MacDrive solution can't work.

 

[misterjangles]

ah, i may have missed your original question. If you create a mac format partition, you can simply share it using parallels sharing, then map a drive in windows. you don't need macdrive at all. The same goes with external drives as well.