Major issues setting up physical disk

I am a paying customer for the MAC version, about to start using the Windows version. But first I have a major headache to solve.

After MUCH frustration I was able to get it to mount & boot my separate 1.5 TB disk. The host & guest are both Windows 7 service pack 1. The machine is a core 2 duo 2.6 ghz with 4 gb ram. The host is 64 bit / guest 32 bit install. 2gb allocated to the guest. There is nothing else running on the host.

The Starting Windows screen appears - CPU usage stays around 11% in the performance monitor and disk IO peaks at 0.250 megs. Snails crawl somewhere around 1 meg last time I checked, so that makes parallels slower than a snail!!!!

Any ideas? The drive is connected via SATA 3.0 GB and works fine when booted from directly. This is a major deal breaker, all other frustrations aside. I do not want to run this drive as an image file. One it's too big, two I want to still be able to boot it directly when needed.

Thanks.........

 

I give up. This thing is a time sink.