Hi, I have a slightly "peculiar" setup to be able to seamlessly share a drive between Boot Camp (native, booting into it), OS X (leopard) and Boot camp on Parallels: The drive in question is FAT32 so that I can read and write in windows and OSX. In parallels I have it as "owned" by OSX, and shared automatically by parallels as a network drive into the Boot camp VM. The network drive then gets assigned the same drive letter in windows when booting into Parallels, as it does to the same drive, in physical access mode, when booting natively into boot camp. The point of all this is for me to be able to use the drive in my windows VM, with consistent paths, regardless of whether I am physically booted into boot camp, or running it from within parallels. It all works fine except one thing: I cannot write-protect (mark as read-only) files on the network drive shared by parallels from OSX. I don't know where the issue is: - problem with OSX FAT32 handling - problem with Parallels windows share handling - problem with windows file sharing, permissions or something like that Something that makes all this even more interesting (to me) is that the existing read-only flags ARE respected, and can be REMOVED - just not added back afterwards. I go to the file properties in windows explorer, check the read-only box, hit OK, everything looks like it worked, but when I go back into the properties it's unchecked again. Another interesting aside is that I cannot see how the windows Fat32 "read-only" property is handled in OSX at all - it does not seem to be reflected at all in the official unix-style permissions visible with the command-line "ls -l" command. Any help would be enormously appreciated!!! Thanks, Tao
Hi John, Thanks for the response bt this is not very helpful. As I noted above, I want read / write access from either OS, and neither of those options provides that (easily, using standard components - I don't want to be accessng an HFS+ from windows when I boot into boot camp). Additionally, Fat32, in and of itself, certainly DOES support the windows file "read-only" property. The only time that it does not work (and it only does not work for SETTING it - reading it works fine) is in Parallels when the Fat32 drive is accessed as a network share from OSX. I have in fact got around this for now by unmounting the drive before starting parallels, and adding the Fat32 drive as a second boot camp HD in the parallels configuration. The UI does not allow you to do this, but by manually editing the configuration file you can do it (note, you always need to manually unmount / eject the Fat32 drive in question before you start the parallels configuration - parallels does not do this automatically for anything other than the primary boot camp partition). If anyone needs help with this at any point feel fre to contact me at tao at klerks dot biz. All the best, Tao
