Virtual HDD name problem

P

pkh

Bit poster
I'm hosting a Windows XP guest system on a MBP, running build 3036. My current VM was originally created with 1970.

Is there any way -- either with an existing VM or by installation of a new VM -- to change the naming scheme of the virtual HDDs in Windows XP? My drives are currently named "Virtual HDD [0]" and "Virtual HDD [2]", and I want to make the "[n]" part of the name either go away or change to something else. The brackets in the name are causing problems with a tool I'm using; updating the tool to fix its bug with regard to the hard drive names is not a fast enough solution for me.

Obviously, if there's a way to do it in the existing VM, that would be the preferred method, but I can deal with rebuilding the machine if it'll solve this problem. :)

-pkh
 
It's not clear to me from your post whether those names are host or guest names. If they are host names, just fine the files in OSX and rename them. Then edit your VM and change the names in the property sheet.

If they are guest names, change them in Windows using the properties dialog in Explorer.
 
Apologies for being unclear: these are the names of the "physical" hard drive devices on the Windows XP guest installation. (As distinct from the names of the Windows volumes, which are easily changeable in the volume's properties.)

Unless you're looking at a seriously different properties box for the devices, I think you're referring to changing the name of the volume, not the disk. To see something similar to what I'm looking at, you can probably go to device manager and expand the "disk drives" entry. The name of the device does not appear to be mutable from inside windows, to me -- but if there's a way to do it that I'm just missing, please tell me where I've missed it!
 
Those names appear to come from the driver and there is probably no easy way to change them. On a physical Windows box, the names appear to come from the devices themselves. The RAID box on one of my servers shows up with the manufacturers name and model. I don't have time to dig into the drivers to find out where the names come from, but they don't appear to be on the virtual disks themselves.
 
Yep, this is the impression I have as well; in a physical device, I would expect that this information is burned onto the drive's interface card somewhere and read by the driver. In this case, I'd expect it to be "burned into" the Parallels software somewhere and read by the driver. (Interestingly enough, though, a binary grep of my .hdd file does match the device name in Windows XP -- I may have to play with trying to change it on a dummy drive. Hmm.)

I'm hoping it's magically secretly configurable in the .pvs or in a dot file in /Library/Parallels somehow, but I'm betting it's not.

Thanks for poking at this, even if it's just helped to confirm my suspicion that I'll need to figure out a way to contact Parallels support. :)
 
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