I work on a Mac Pro with two CD/DVD drives : -Genuine Sony CD/DVD drive installed by Apple -An LG CD/DVD/BD (BluRay Disc) drive into the second bay Clearly : Will the second drive be recognized by actual version of Parallels desktop 3.0 and a XP SP2 virtual machine ? If not, have we to wait for a specific adaptation in a future Parallels Desktop release ? Thanks in advance for your help....
I'm not sure about a the LG drive mounted internally. As I recall it is SATA, and as I recall, the Optical SATA ports on the Mac Pro aren't monitored by Parallels because Apple doesn't use them for it's optical setup. Don't quote me on that...it might work. However, I can confirm an LG Blu-Ray drive will work when mounted in a USB enclosure, such as the Addonics enclosure, can be directly connected to Parallels via the USB controls in Parallels, essentially making it native and bypassing the Apple -> Windows translation of the hardware. One thing to note: you will not be able to play Blu-Ray (or HD-DVD) movies in Parallels. The "virtual video card" isn't a valid video card based on the annoyingly restrictive "industry standards." Also, the latest PowerDVD doesn't work under Parallels. You can, however, reboot into Bootcamp to play Blu-Ray. Another thing to note: Bootcamp will not recognize the 2 optical SATA ports on the Mac Pro without some annoying tampering with the virtual bios Apple creates for Bootcamp. The easiest way to work around this is via a USB enclosure. A note on the Addonics USB to SATA enclosure: the SATA power adaptor is very flimsy and breaks easily. Otherwise it's a good enclosure. If they'd made the case about 1/2 inch longer, it would work better. Also, you don't need the fan in the Addonics case (it's noisy, and for an LG optical drive, unnecessary): just unplug it.
Thanks for answer Chaos... My internal BluRay drive is attached in PATA (like the primary DVD drive)... The two drives run well under Windows Bootcamp...(Fortunately ! My Mac IS a PC...) In fact, I just want to know if somebody has succeded in a BluRay drive attachement as second drive under Windows Parallels OS ?
I also would like to know how to get my LG BE06 working, bootcamp has audio issues which render it useless and parallels - the virtual video card is not good enough for PowerDVD - not happy, $500 on the blu-ray device and I can't watch then
Yes, even with Parallels V5, video driver cannot be fast enough for PowerDVD... But with Bootcamp startup and Intel based Macs, you have a reel high end PC hardware running standard Windows OS... And I don't believe in a very unlikely audio issue relating to "Macintosh ADN"... (Bootcamp Apple drivers seem to be Windows cerified); I think rather in a hardware failure or more simply in a wrong setting somewhere... Personaly, I read BluRay under XP Bootcamp with PowerDVD in analog stereo mode with good quality... However, I have not tried numerical optical multi channel audio output... Hope this helps, sorry for my bad "frenglish"...
There are known issues with MBP and sound under bootcamp (read: I know what I am talking about). I'll wait for OSX to have native support for Bluray
