I finally got my new Guest Windows XP Pro OS up and running. But when I tried to install my first Windows based software, it did not work. This is an older program that uses 3 1/2 install floppies but I have a USB connector to an external A drive and I can install it on my regular Windows PC but cannot on Parallels guest OS. The Mac OSX system recognizes the USB connection but the Parallels VM does not. Can someone help?
create ISO images of your floppy disks and then mount those in Parallels under the "Connect Image" menu for the floppy disk. The issues is occuring becuase OSX loads a driver for the external floppy, thus siezing control of the device. Parallels cannot then access the device properly. You could try unplugging the floppy drive, do a kextstat > /tmp/before.txt then plug in the floppy drive and do kextstat > /tmp/after.txt then do a diff on the 2 files and unload the driver that was loaded by OSX. This may then give Parallels access to the device.
The easiest way is probably to just copy the files from the floppies to a folder on your Mac, and burn a CD. Usually there will be no file name conflicts IME. Then insert the CD with Windows running, navigate to the CD and run the installer. This will work for most older programs. If that doesn't work, creating subfolders for disk1, disk2, etc. might help. You may have to play with it, but there's a good chance you will find a combination that works.
of course.. thats much simpler... my mind always seems to want to find the most technical way of doing it
