USB Hard Drive Cycle of Death on 3188

[cmcbrian]

I recently purchased a WD 160GB USB hard drive, with the intent of using it with Parallels. At first, everything worked suprisingly well. I selected the device "External HDD" from the device menu, formatted it for NTFS from my Virtual Machine.... I had repeatly restarted the VM and mounted and umounted the drive.... I was happy camper.

Then, two days into using the drive, switching to the device via the Parallels menu stopped working. And I would end up in one of 2 states:

From the VM I would get an endless display of the followig message (multiple Alerts stacked on top of each other)
"USB device you are trying to connect to the virtual machine is being used by another application. Close that application or unplug the device and plug it again. Then try to connect the device again."

OR

From the Mac I would see that hard disk volume was being mounted and re-mounted over and over again. The only soultion would for this is to unplug the drive.

It would be great to be a happy camper again. What bit of "state" on the Mac or VM do I need to clear out to make this work again?

Oh, and one other thing, if the VM starts up with my external USB hard drive NTFS mounted in the Finder (read-only), the VM will refuse to start saying something to the effec tthat "my Boot Camp configuration is too freaky for it to deal with".

Any help, as soon as possible, would be greatly appreciated.

 

[mkstevo]

Hello , I had a similar problem with USB flash disks . As I was sure it all worked in 3186 , I downgraded to that ( and installed Parallels Tools ) and they did indeed work again .

Following a suggestion to map the drives to shared folders ( point the share to /Volumes/NameOfUSBHardDisk ) which worked well . I then tried to reinstall 3188 ( and Paralles Tools - again ) . After doing this the USB disks seem to work perfectly . No idea why , just happy it works !