Windows boot camp on main disk, parallels on external disk

Hi,

I have a bit of an unusual problem with parallels 7 / windows 7.
I have an iMac 27 inch with one internal disk. I wanted to install a regular windows 7 boot camp partition on a completely separate, external disk (I like having separate disks for separate oses). I learnt to my disappointment that windows 7 (or any windows) hates booting from external disks ('missing operating system' message).

The funny thing, though, is that using parallels desktop, you *can* boot a version of windows installed on an external (firewire) disk. Pretty cool.

But for reasons I won't detail here, I decided to swap things around. In other words, my windows 7 partition (brand new, reinstalled from scratch) is now the only partition on the main, internal disk, while the os x lion partition (brand new as well) is the main partition on an external disk. Since OS X is not a pain about booting from external disk, this works great. I can dual boot without any issues.

Except... that for some bizarre reason, parallels does *not* like it. If I try to boot the windows 7 'boot camp' partition from parallels desktop, I get the horrible "Missing operating system" message, which you normally get when windows is on an external disk.

I try to open up the parallels XML configuration file, and properly point to the disk, but that does not fix the issue.

 

Sorry to bump, but does anyone have any idea?