Where did my Windows second internal drives go?

Here's my set up.

2012 Mac mini - I've added a second 128g SSD to the system and divided it into two 64G divisions, each of which contains an OS - so one division is OSX, the other is a bootcamped Windows 7 64bit install. The boot camp install works great, windows loads fast and application open very fast indeed.

I still have the original .5T drive in there as well, also partitioned into two drives, of 250g each. One is formatted for OSX and one is NTSF.

When I boot into Windows, it sees the second partition of the second drive (ie the NTFS formatted one) as Drive F, and all data and non time critical applications are installed there.

I've installed Parallels 7, it's found my bootcamped windows 7 install just fine and configured itself to run there.

However, when I look at the drive mappings in My Computer, the F: drive is gone. Just not there. In fact, drop box complains as soon as I open Windows in Parallels that F: is missing, since it's configured to point there. It finds the DVD drive, and all my networked drives, just not the local one.

So where did F: go? Without being able to see this, Parallels as a product is pretty much useless to me. Is there a way to get this configured correctly?

 

You know what? Never mind. This just doesn't work at all.

Reboot and now parallels won't even start. I just get start up errors, and the help for this problem doesn't work either (in fact, just comes back with errors at the terminal level).

Plus it's screwed up my OSX UI to the point where I'm getting about 5 FPS when moving any windows around, which shouldn't happen.

And apparently I need to relicense Windows now and my disks are 6000 miles away, so now I have issues with my basic install of windows. Which is just truly awesome. Great job guys.

All in all, not a good experience. Glad I tried the trial version and didn't lay out any $ for this.

 

Hang on a minute here. Before giving up, before even considering Parallels, can you boot OK into Boot Camp and switch and boot OK into OS X? I don't understand how your licensing could be screwed up. Can you give more details on the errors you are getting with Parallels and with the licensing?

If everything does work OK, first reinstall Parallels. Create a brand new VM pointing to the BC partition. In the configuration for the VM, you can add the second drive as a "shared folder" under Options -> Sharing -> Custom folders. Add the other partition and it will show up as a "Network Partition" drive in Windows.

Steve

 

Yeah, I'm just having a bad day. Sorry. Stress and all that.

So the licensing issue - When I bootcamped back into Windows 7, it told me I would have to re-license (both Win 7 and office 2010) - apparently I have "reduced permissions" - whatever that means. That's a problem for me since my disks are 6000 miles away on their way to the UK. I can't afford for Windows to sudden go bye bye since there's such sensitive time critical code / build processes on that machine.

OSX - like I said, the install went fine. Installed, found my bootcamp install fine, set itself up, got the Cohesion thing (which, by the way, is very cool, although also can be very confusing. I can't tell which version of Firefox I have open, for example) however, it just wouldn't see the second drive. And since that's where all my code / build process are... well, not that useful.

I've been advised to do a second Win 7 install for pure VM usage, but a) I don't have the space - the set up I have means that the drives where the OS is installed is a partitioned 128G drive, 64G for each OS, and I'm already about 70% used on the windows side, so no space for it and b) like I said, the discs are en-route to the UK right now anyway. So Bootcamp install it is.

However, like I said, when I returned from the boot into Windows 7, Parallels refuses to start up. I get some "Service not started" error, looked up the error in the resultant dialog (which is handy that), which told me to go to the terminal to stop / start the service by hand, which I tried, however the launch controller doesn't know what that service is (which is less handy), much less let me start it by hand.

Plus it knackered my OS GUI updates - looks like the rendering was handled in software instead of the GPU - lots of tearing when I move windows around, looking at spaces is very glitchy. All in all, not a great experience. I basically dumped Parallels, and at least I got my GUI updating fast again.