I can only see references to needing read/write privs on images for parallels to work. Is there a way to allow users to run windows in read-only mode so that the os is refreshed (pristine) on reboot - virtual pc could do this or installing deepfreeze (for windows) can do this. If not, any plans for allowing this? thanks.
Right now, Windows' hard disk must be read write. This is a Windows limitation. If it weren't for this requirement, it would be possible to have a Windows live CD, which would be a very good thing, and go a long way towards eliminating some real nasties such as rootkits, but alas, Windows requires write access. To allow read only, I suppose one could create a shadow disk to hold changes that could be deleted as a rollback. The shadow technique goes back to the 1960's when some filesystems stored changes for efficiency (disks were slooooooww) and to allow reverting to earlier versions of files.
VMWare allows this - the ability to not save any changes to the image. Not too sure how they do it - think they store the disk changes seperatley somehow then throw the changes away. I used to use that functionality with VMWare Server, for test machines, esp if i had one that i'ld proved a bug on (so the devs couldn't mess up my bug!).
