How do I add a second windows drive under parallels

H

huazi

Bit poster
Hi, please can someone kindly offer some help?

my question is simple, I recently added a second hard disk to my mac pro, on that second disk I made a parition for windows. I also have boot camp installed and runs vista on a parition off the first disk. Booting into vista it recogonised the new windows parition of the second disk, therefore under boot camp my vista had C: and D: drives.

Running parallels, took me a while to get it to boot from the windows parition of the first disk, however after bbooting into windows, it does not recogonise the parition of my second disk, therefore it only had C: drive.

Hence my question is, how do you get parallels to add a drive from a windows parition of a second disk?

Thanks in advance!
 
huazi said:
Hi, please can someone kindly offer some help?

my question is simple, I recently added a second hard disk to my mac pro, on that second disk I made a parition for windows. I also have boot camp installed and runs vista on a parition off the first disk. Booting into vista it recogonised the new windows parition of the second disk, therefore under boot camp my vista had C: and D: drives.

Running parallels, took me a while to get it to boot from the windows parition of the first disk, however after bbooting into windows, it does not recogonise the parition of my second disk, therefore it only had C: drive.

Hence my question is, how do you get parallels to add a drive from a windows parition of a second disk?

Thanks in advance!
Click to expand...

Hello!

It is possible to connect this drive to the virtual machine by means of Parallels Shared folders feature.

Best regards,
John
 
huazi said:
Hence my question is, how do you get parallels to add a drive from a windows parition of a second disk?
Click to expand...

The method suggested by Johnv won't be much use if you have a NTFS partition. What you want is a "custom boot camp configuration" which is described here:

http://forum.parallels.com/post42129.html

(warning - not for the faint hearted - requires manually editing the pvs file with TextEdit - make copious backups!)
 
Hanging...

I have 3 drives.

Bay 1: 250 gb, which is partitioned into my OS X drive (disk0s1) and Vista 64 bit NTFS (disk0s2)
Bay 2: 500gb, FAT32
Bay 3: 500gb, NTFS, which contains a new Vista install 32bit (so I can run my bootcamp install in parallels), this is disk2s2

I made my pvs file look like this:

Disk 0:0 enabled = 1
Disk 0:0 = 1
Disk 0:0 media = 1
Disk 0:0 connected = 1
Disk 0:0 image = Boot Camp;disk2s2
Disk 0:0 cylinders = 0
Disk 0:0 heads = 0
Disk 0:0 sectors = 0
Disk 0:1 enabled = 0
Disk 0:1 = 0
Disk 1:0 enabled = 1
Disk 1:0 = 2
Disk 1:0 media = 1
Disk 1:0 connected = 1
Disk 1:0 image = Default CD/DVD-ROM
Disk 1:1 enabled = 0
Disk 1:1 = 0


When I startup Parallels Bootcamp, it says "Boot from hard drive... _ " and then just sits there and hangs.. (also, as soon as i click start the drive in bay 3, the one with the install, disappears from the desktop in OS X, i just assume its cause Parallels is using it).


Does anyone see whats wrong. Is my PVS file correct?
 
Hello louish,

Parallels Desktop 3.0 does not support Vista 64, please sorry. Only 32-bit Guest Operating Systems are currently supported. You can find the note in System Requirements.

In general to boot from the Boot Camp Windows partition in case of non-standard Boot Camp configuration you should do the following:

1. In the Finder, go to Applications -> Utilities and double-click the Terminal icon.
2. Type the diskutil list command and press Enter.
3. Find the required Bootcamp Windows partition (e.g. 3: Microsoft Basic Data NO NAME 31.4 GB disk0s3) and note down the partition number and the disk number.
4. In the Finder browse to Documents-Parallels and find the virtual machine .PVS file. Open the file by means of TextEdit and find the following line:
Disk 0:0 image = Boot Camp
5. Change this line to:
Disk 0:0 image = Boot Camp;diskXsY
Where:
X is the number of the physical hard disk
Y is the number of the Boot Camp Windows partition
These parameters are shown by means of the diskutil list command.
6. Save the changes.
7. Close TextEdit and double-click the .PVS file to start Windows.

Best regards,
Xenos
 
Yeah I know 64 bit doesnt works so in my Bay3 drive i installed another copy of Vista but 32 bit this time, when I changed my pvs file to read the correct drive, it just locked up. it would say Booting from drive.... then just sit there for hours and do nothing.

So I formatted everything again, putting Vista 32 bit on my main harddrive, the 32 gig partition that Apple's Bootcamp originally setup. I edit the pvs file to point to the correct drive, and now i get the error of No Boot Image on Drive (or something to that effect, sorry im not on the mac right now so i dont remember the exact error). But.. pretty much, it is booting into the correct drive, but then not loading.

I tried the other company's software and theirs loaded the new vista install just fine, but i dont like that other companies software at all, id much rather prefer parallels.

I dont mind formatting 100% of my computer.. im getting Leopard tomorrow, so Ill just do a 100% complete format, repartition the drive, start from scratch, and hope it works.

Thanks
 
Xenos said:
Hello louish,
Parallels Desktop 3.0 does not support Vista 64, please sorry. Only 32-bit Guest Operating Systems are currently supported.
Click to expand...

He wasn't trying to run Vista 64 - he's booting that natively, but he has a Vista 32 bit install on disk2s2 that he wants to use with Parallels.

louish: do you ever actually need to boot Vista 32 natively using boot camp?

If you're resigned to maintaining 2 windows installs anyway, I'd do a clean install of the 32 bit version to a "pure" virtual machine & set your FAT32 partition as a shared folder.

If you can't live with FAT32 for your Windows data, and still want the third disc as NTFS data then you can still access it via a custom bootcamp config, but you don't have to boot from it. (I've wishlisted the ability to connect/disconnect internal hard drives as if they were removable, but I'm not sure if it has really gone home as its a rather MacPro-centric issue).
 
I completely got rid of my 64 bit version now, I did a fresh install of vista 32 bit on my main partitioned C drive. But, Vista has never let me install on Fat32, it always forces me to install on ntfs.

Is that my problem? Does Parallels only work on FAT32 drives? if thats the case, Ill format again and try to find how to install vista on fat32.
 
itsdapead, sounds like you know a lot about this stuff. Here is a question for you.

My Goal is to run a Hardware RAID 0 setup for both Mac OX Leopard and Windows Vista.

I want to get 2x 150GB Raptor 10,000 RPM hard drives and setting that up as Raid 0 for OS X.

Then I was planning on using my 2x 500GB RE 7200 RPM hard drives and setting that up as RAID 0 for my Windows install. Then I wanted to boot into the Mac, run Parellels bootcamp install on the Raid drive. Is that my fastest solution, or would it be faster to run a "Virtual" install located on the 2x 150 gb 15,000 rpm drives?

Also, I was planning on using 5GB ram, 3 gigs for OS X and 2 Gigs for Windows... you dont see any problem with that do you?
 
louish said:
itsdapead, sounds like you know a lot about this stuff. Here is a question for you.
My Goal is to run a Hardware RAID 0 setup for both Mac OX Leopard and Windows Vista.
Click to expand...

Well, the only RAID system I've ever set up was on a Linux box and RAID 1, so I claim no expertise in this matter. If you want my uneducated guess, though, only the virtual install on an OS X raid set would stand a snowball's chance in hell, and if it did work it would probably be better, because the RAID processing overhead would fall on the host OS, not the virtualized, single-core guest.

What are you doing under Windows than needs RAID 0 but can tolerate a single CPU core and the general performance penalty of running under virtualization? I'd be surprised if RAID vs. non-RAID was the dominant bottleneck! I'd only bother with RAID 0 if I was doing serious realtime video stuff and I wouldn't dream of trying that under Parallels.

Oh, AFAIK the MacPro only does <i>software</i> RAID without a $$$HOWMUCH!!? add-on (but that might not be such a biggie if you're just doing RAID 0).

(Can Windows boot off a RAID set these days without being fed a floppy disc with drivers?)

...but don't let me stop you experimenting if you just want to see if it can be done!
 
louish,
As itsdapead said, we need to know what you are trying to accomplish to assist you.

Parallels has reportedly had 'spotty' coverage on a RAID with past versions, I have not run Parallels on my RAID myself, and thus cannot speak from first-hand experience.

Tell us a little bit more about what you want to do and we can help you find a solution.
 
Hello everybody,

louish, before you do a 100% complete format, the drive repartition and so on with Leopard, I'd like no notify that Parallels developers are waiting for today's final Leopard release to fix some PD issues that are possible. We'll release PD updates as soon as the expected issues are fixed.

Best regards,
Xenos
 
My goal? Speed, speed, speed.

I am a 100% windows user. I upgraded to Vista, and always concider downgrading back to XP for the speed. I truly "WANT" to be a Mac User... but OS X is just too slow. The web browsers (all of them) in OS X are terribly slow. I installed Parallels and ran XP and installed IE7 and IE7 would launch and load pages WAY faster via Parallels than any browser on the Mac could.

I WANT to switch to Mac, but I cant because I do not want to sacrifice speed. I use 2 programs religiously, HomeSite 4.5 and Paint Shop Pro 7.04 (i do not like the newer releases because they are slower). There is nothing in a newer version of Paint Shop pro that I need, and PSP 7.04 launchs in less than a second. Photoshop takes forever to launch and takes up WAAAAYYY too much processor and ram.

I do web developement, im working 1000 things at the same time. At any given time, I have 30+ windows open. I use IE7 over FireFox on Windows because it loads faster and opens faster. I need programs to respond fast, immediatly, etc.

One thing I dont liek about OSX is the mouse speed (for the life of me I cant match the mouse speed, its just a little slower on OSX, and when I adjust it, then its too fast) I know thats something i just have to get used to, but im slower when the mouse doesnt respond and i expect it to. The other thing is the slow web browsing. Im hoping installing Leopard fixes the speed of the browser.

So.. if im in OSX, i will be running Windows in Parallels ONLY for HomeSite 4.5 and Paint Shop Pro, both programs take very little processing power or memory.

Im looking into Gimp to replace PSP, and hopefully some other program to replace HomeSite ( i just can never find a replacement that does a good enough job color coding my php / html files, im so used to homesite any time I change programs, i slow down, and I need to be fast. )

So.. im lookikng into Raid 0 strictly for speed speed speed. Anythign I can do to make it faster.
 
Oh.. and for those of you who think im a little crazy for needing so much speed for a couple simple programs, I also do photography, video production, etc.. so im using Premier, Final Cut, Aperature, Lightroom on a regular basis too. I just didnt mention these cause i was only mentioning the Windows Programs i didnt want to leave behind cause I havent found good replacements.

I have found that Parallels runs the programs very good, but there are a few bugs with Paint Shop Pro. When I click the Browse button (to browse the hard drive in thumbnail view within PSP), it doesnt let me select folders / drives.. Its a major problem, but i havent looked much into a solution to fix it cause i never have enough time to tinker with it cause there is too much work to be done and i end up rebooting nativly back into windows to get back to work.

Clint

p.s. (installing leopard right now... 1st problem, it cant upgrade the system, LAME. I have to pretty much do a complete format, i cant even archive., oh well.)
 
louish said:
I installed Parallels and ran XP and installed IE7 and IE7 would launch and load pages WAY faster via Parallels than any browser on the Mac could.
Click to expand...

How much RAM do you have (you mentioned planning to get 5G which sounds sensible but how much do you have now)? OS X has many strengths, but being frugal with memory use is not amongst them. The standard 1G on Mac Pros is a complete joke and useless if you're going to use Parallels seriously. RAM is usually the biggest bottleneck - if you start to run out, the computer will start thashing the discs, and adding more RAM will be much more effective than trying to speed up the discs...

At a guess I'd say that IE starts faster because most of its components get loaded when the OS starts up, and the IE "application" that you launch is just a shell. Can't say that I'd noticed any night-and-day difference with general browsing but I'd concur that IE7 in Parallels vs. Safari in OS X feels a bit slicker at some things (like Google Maps) but this is more likely to be due to differences in the scripting engine (and probably authors optimising their AJAX code for IE). I also suspect that open source software (Safari is partially based on open source) that runs on multiple OSs and CPU types doesn't really have a level playing field against single-platform, closed-source products which can be hard-coded for a single OS and dump lots of extraction abstraction and modularity (especially if it plays fast and loose with web and net standards!)

...none of this is likely to be changed dramatically by using a RAID setup.

And, since I'm not employed by Apple, I can safely say that if you have a big investment in time & familiarity with specific bits of Windows software, you shouldn't switch to OS X just for the hell of it.
 
Last edited:
I have 3 GB ram right now.

As for switching, I know, i dont know why I keep telling myself switch... if it aint broke, dont fix it. I love Vista.. i just WANT to love OSX.
 
louish,

itsdapead is right on. I would never run a computer with > 1 GB RAM anymore, ESPECIALLY if you are using Parallels.

What makes you think that your HD is what is bottlenecking?

Strange that you say IE7 is much faster than Safari, my Server with 5 GB of RAM will load pages faster over ARD than any computer with IE7 I've used, locally or over the internet. It's literally click and go.
 
Oh yeah, for the record, I closed Safari and re-opened it, while running Parallels, on my 2 GB laptop... It took under a second to open.
 
I have never had less than 3GB ram. In Vista 32 bit i can only get 2gb, thats why I installed 64 bit vista for a few months.... but decided to go back to 32 bit since i had too many incompatibility problems.

I dont think my harddrive is bottlenecking, i just want it to be faster. I just want everything fast. I actually almost feel like having 4 monitors slows down my computer a lot too... I have 2x 30" and 2x 20" and its nice, but i feel like sometimes thats the bottle neck.

I just finished formatting everything.. I guess Ill wait for the new Parallels update before installing parallels again to try it out.
 
louish,
Considering your investment for hardware and desire maximum speed, in all honesty, you are probably best off just using BC, then waiting for Leopard and using their 'hot-switch' feature for BC.

From your descriptions, it sounds like you are having a bottleneck of some sort...
Think of it this way, you have a car, and you are driving on a track; the track is very windy. You have a drag car, and saying you want the lowest time, you throw on another turbo. It won't help your time that much, you need to look at improving your turning; THAT'S the bottleneck, your turning abilities.
 
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