MacDrive in XP

Hi,

I was wondering if anyone has been able to run MacDrive in XP through Parallels. It worked fine in Boot Camp but no dice so far in Parallels. If anyone has been successful or unsuccessful I would like to hear about it. thanks

 

What is MacDrive?

 

MacDrive is an app that allows a PC to recognize and use a Mac formatted hard drive.

 

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Just so I've got this straight. You want to read a Mac hard drive in an XPooh VM running on a Mac?
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O.K. - currently Parallels does not have access to physical partitions on a hard drive - some day, but not yet. The current method used by non-Mac Parallels users is to do a windoze share from the host OS, and access it thru the network on the guest OS. We Linux users use SAMBA to accomplish that, but I'm sure that the Mac can share a drive to windoze boxes on a network. When you share a Mac drive to windoze it gets read as tho it were a windoze drive, so you don't need MacDrive.

 

So if I want to access the files on my iPod, I need to mount it on the Mac side, share it, the connect to it over the nework in Parallels?

 

Boy, would I ever not want that. That would be a security hole you could fly a B52 through. Programs running on the VM can't access the host OS, and that's a very good thing.

When my Windows VM gets a virus that deletes everything it can reach, the rest of my world is uneffected.

 

By the way it is probably also a sure fire way of corrupting disks. In the VMware world you cannot mount a host partition in a guest at the same time as the host has it mounted. Neither OS knows what the other is doing. Stick to shares.

 

This is certainly doable on the Mac (which ships with samba), though it can be a performance problem in some cases. But the biggest issue I've had with using host SMB shares is the situation in which the host machine doesn't have an Internet connection. When that happens, the guest OS also thinks it has no connection and can't see the host SMB shares. Is there a workaround for this?

 

FWIW I can access my Macintosh HD and my iDisk from my Parallels WinXP Pro VM no problem. Copy, paste, drag and drop between all of them is seamless.

 

before upgrading to parallels build 3188, i too was able to drag, drop, copy, paste, cut, etc on mac native HD through parallels. Now, I am not able to do so, although I can do everything on the external HD. I thought it might have been macdrive 6, so I upgraded to macdrive 7 and no luck. none of the drives even show up as macdrives with the little heart icon through parallels either. not sure what is going on.

 

It's a reasonable request

The latest version of Parallels allows you to boot into windows either through bootcamp or as a VM. As a VM it's easy to share files, but when loaded into bootcamp you need MacDrive if you want to access your HFS+ partition.

I am evaluating Parallels right now and would like to know if the current incompatibility between the two is going to be fixed. (MacDrive claims it's a Parallels problem.)

 

What incompatibility? In Bootcamp, you access the Mac disk via MacDrive because OSX isn't running. In the VM you access the Mac disk via the sharing Parallels provides.

You can't use MacDrive in the VM because two operating systems can't both access the same partition native at the same time without corruption. It simply cannot work.

It's a "problem" that can't be solved because it isn't a problem.