I know Parallels can mount .iso files in place of CD drive, and Parallels .HDD files as hard disks. Can you consider mounting of .DMG files too? I'd like to be able to mount an AES encrypted disk image, or be able to use compressed CDROM images (which are stored as .DMG instead of .ISO). It would be great to allow read/write too.
You're not alone with that requirement. I would also love to be able to mount a compressed and encrypted .DMG image ! ISO's and DMG images are (to the best of my knowledge) pretty well related so it should not be impossible.
I think the problem you will run into here isn't getting PW to mount the image; it's what the guest OS makes of it. ISO files can be mounted as CDROM images because they contain the image of a file system that Windows understands; a CDROM. That's not true for other images. In fact, what really needed, IMHO, is the *opposite* of what you guys are suggesting; I think we need the ability to mount in Mac OS X one of the ".hdd" hard disk images files that PW uses for its virtual hard drives (of course, the VM would need to be powered-down while the image was mounted in the host OS). For HDDs formatted that the Mac can recognise (currently FAT32 read-write and NTFS read-only), that would allow direct access to the virtual HDD from Mac w/o running PW and doing funny network or shared folder access. Vmware has had such a tool for some time, and it's been a life-saver for me on a number of occasions. --Tim
I Agree...that would be really nice to be able to do. In either case it would be nice to access the DMG by "mounting" inside the VM. I have several large images that I can't convert to ISO and some also that have been compressed or encrypted and require a password to open. This is RISKY, and not recommended for a permanent solution, but it works for now...I use networking to access the images after I've mounted the DMG file on the Mac. Trust me, this is NOT the best solution, but it does work in a pinch and does require that you either enable sharing of the host's /Volumes directory, or specific mounted image directories (thus the huge risk). I have also converted some of my DMG files to ISO for use in VMware situations, but lose the compression and encryption options in doing so.
Use Shared Folders I solve this problem by mounting the encrypted .dmg and sharing it to the guest OS using PW's Shared Folders feature in the VM config. You can even set your guest OS to automatically mount the shared volume to a given mountpoint or drive letter at boot time. So long as one is using host-only networking, I consider this reasonably secure. With bridged ethernet, there is perhaps a possibility that another network client could listen in. I believe MacTopia [above] is referring to turning on Sharing of the relevant volumes or folders in System Preferences.app. That would indeed be very risky (from a security perspective). Use PW's Shared Folders instead.
When shared folders are stable, that will definately be the better way to go. However the current method that PW is sharing folders via the Network Neighborhood has very similar risks... I can't quite figure out how they are authenticating access to the folders though...anyone else? If I have permissions to share the folder in the VM configuration, then the VM doesn't seem to go through any other methods of authenticating the guest VM's access...at least I can't tell for sure...and can't test it, because Beta 6 shared folders isn't working consistently for me...crashing the windows guest VMs, etc. ??
You can already do this with the "uncompressed" variety, by simply renaming the file with a ".dmg" instead of a ".hdd". You can even specify the ".dmg" in the VM configuration, if you type it directly in the text box instead of choosing the disk image with the file selection dialog. You have to be *very* careful, though, not to mount it writable on the Mac while a Parallels VM (running or suspended) is using the image.
