a driver to mount (or a tool to load) the content of a virtual harddisk directory, without to startup the guest system to extract/manipulate files.
Also another vote for this. This capability should cross mac platforms (i.e. also work for PPC macs). I'd even be happy is there was a 3rd party requirement (MacDrive or equivalent), as long as there was *some* way tot do it!
That would be useful. I imagine if they were to release the specs on the format of the virtual machine, some 3rd party tools would come out pretty quickly to convert other virtual drives (VMWare, VPC) to Parallels..
Bear in mind, filesystems are not Parallels' job Bear in mind that the host OS has to be able to understand the filesystem on the virtual disk, and if that's NTFS, the code doesn't exist for Mac OS X (to my knowledge) and sorta kinda works on Linux because it's not an open specification. So if you're using XP and NTFS, which is generally the right configuration to use, you won't be able to read the filesystem any more than you would if it were a real hard disk that you pulled out of a PC and stuck into a Mac. In the case of FAT32 etc. that wouldn't be a problem. Just pointing out that Parallels can possibly provide a way for a Mac to see the data inside a virtual disk but that that's only part of what's needed if you want to be able to access the data therein.
There is limited NTFS support. You should be able to mount it read only. Writing to NTFS is unreliable and can lead to filesystem corruptions.