Black Screen booting Win11 VM when external USB disc drive is attached (usb pass-through)

V

VicencP

Bit poster
Hi all,
I'm using a Mac Mini M4 Pro and Parallels Desktop 20 (Pro Edition).
I'm experiencing a peculiar problem with my Windows 11 VM on my Mac. Normally, when the VM is running and I connect an external USB disc drive, my Mac correctly detects it and prompts me to choose whether to connect it to the Mac or the VM. If I select the VM, it works perfectly fine.

The issue arises when I try to permanently assign the external USB disc drive to the VM through its USB settings (by checking "remember this setting"). After doing this, the next time the VM attempts to boot, it just displays a black screen and fails to load Windows . It never actually starts up.

Am I doing anything wrong or forget any step? What can I do? Of course I could plug/unplug the USB disc drive every time I boot the VM but I would rather prefer to a more automatic solution.

Any suggestion, please? Thanks!!
 
By the way, I forgot to mention, the external USB disc is EMPTY (not bootable, of course!) and with NTFS format.
 
It sounds like Parallels has trouble when the USB drive is set to auto-connect before the VM boots, causing the black screen. A better approach is to connect the drive manually after Windows starts or use a post-boot script. This avoids conflicts between macOS and the VM trying to access the drive at the same time.
 
MatthewR20 said:
@VicencP Can you post a screenshot of your boot order settings?
https://docs.parallels.com/pdfm-ug-...ettings/hardware-settings/boot-order-settings
Click to expand...
Just to add some more information, I tried many different options: Share Mac volumes (on/off), USB permanent assignments (set and unset); connect drive when the VM is running and reply yes to "remember" to target system or not replying, using the small icon on the top bar to attach the drive to the VM manually ... all the combinations have been tried, and I just get a random behaviour , therefore my conclusion is either:
1.- Maybe the disc is too big (LaCie 10TB) and some times the system (host, or Parallels,...) needs to much time to "connect". Anyway, this is very unlikely, because sometimes it works correctly. The disc is big, but is empty.
2.- there is a bug on MacOS or Parallels Desktop 20

Plug and unplug the disc every time I need to mount it, its not an option, sooner than later I would damage the USB-C connector.

Thanks!
 
ahsanulislams said:
It sounds like Parallels has trouble when the USB drive is set to auto-connect before the VM boots, causing the black screen. A better approach is to connect the drive manually after Windows starts or use a post-boot script. This avoids conflicts between macOS and the VM trying to access the drive at the same time.
Click to expand...

Thank you for your answer!
Plug and unplug the disc every time I need to mount it, its not an option, sooner than later I would damage the USB-C connector.
Thanks!
 
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