Problem connecting external devices via usb

Greetings - I have installed Parallels on my MacBook Pro, which uses OS X 10.4.11 as the host os. The guest os I have installed is XP. So far everything is working except that I can't read external devices from the xp side (external hard drive, or anything else). What am I missing here?

With an external drive plugged in, but ejected from the Mac side, under devices I see listed:

USB to ATA/ATAPI Bridge

but when I click on that I get a the message:


"USB device you are trying to connect to the virtual machine is being used by another process. Wait 5-10 seconds, then try to connect the device again. If this does not help, find the application that blocked up the device and disconnect it manually."

I'm reading the manual and searching online for a solution, but so far, nothing I've tried is working. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

Did you try not to eject device from Finder?