How to mount a NTFS partition in Parallels Win7 VM?

Hi,

I have the following setup:

SSD: 128 GB Mac OS Extended (journaled) / 128 GB Bootcamp (NTFS)
HDD: 500 GB Mac OS Extended (journaled) / 500 GB NTFS
Parallels Desktop 7 for Mac running on Lion

Now I want to use the NTFS partition on the HDD in Windows 7 under Parallels.

I see both HDD partitions in Finder but of course Mac OS can't write to the NTFS partition, so I can't just share it with the VM (it gives me a permission error). When I add the HDD as a second Hard Disk in the hardware configuration of the VM then I can see and access the HDD within windows but then I can't access the Mac OS partition on that drive within Mac OS. I still see it in Finder but it seems to be empty and Finder is loading and loading...

Is there a way to accomplish what I want to do? Using FAT32 is unfortunately not an option because I have files larger 4GB. Using Mac OS Extended (journaled) isn't an option either because I also boot Windows directly and need access to the data partition. And I have no clue how stable and reliably all those 3rd party filesystem drivers are (I just can't use anything marked as experimental or release candidate - only stable)?

Any suggestions appreciated.

Thanks,
Sebastian

 

In case if the fact that Mac cannot write to NTFS is actually the reason of your issue try to install NTFS 3G app - it would help you to enable GPT Mac OS to write on NTFS.

In case if it doesn't help, please send Problem Report from Help menu --> Report a problem and post the ID number here.

 

After some fiddling around I found out that my idea works as expected. There seems to be a bug in Parallels or maybe Windows or Mac OS X that occurs when you boot the VM and have the second HDD assigend to the VM as described above.

Summary / Steps to reproduce:

Requirement: A second HDD in your Mac that has one Mac OS X and one NTFS partition

1. Add an additional Hard Disk to the Bootcamp VM and assign it to the second HDD in your Mac
2. Boot the VM
3. In Finder you will see that the two partitions of our second HDD will disappear and only the Mac OS X partition will a appear again after few seconds
4. You can notice that you can't really access the Mac OS X partition on the HDD because it seems to be empty
5. In Disk Utility unmount and mount the Mac OS X partition on the second HDD
6. You can now access your Mac OS X partition on the second HDD
7. You also can now access the NTFS partition directly in your VM
(8. The NTFS partition is in access and can't be mounted in Mac OS)

 

That seems strange. I don't think Parallels should be unmounting partitions that you have not assigned to the virtual hard disk. Parallels only allows you to assign FAT or NTFS partitions to a Boot Camp type virtual hard disk. Therefore, the Mac OS X partition should not get unmounted.

How are the disks formatted? (fdisk, diskutil, gpt commands)

What are the contents of the virtual hard disk configuration file (config.pvs) inside the .hdd file?

One problem with multiple disks is that Parallels refers to disks by disk device name (diskutil list) but disk device name may change after your Mac restarts so you have to reselect the disk in Parallels.

Another problem is that Parallels unmounts partitions when it doesn't need to (during configuration instead of just when the virtual machine is started). Maybe it needs to unmount the partition to look for files in the partition for some reason which should be optional.