I have a couple of old drives from my last PC in which I have a mixed amount of junk and useful stuff like pictures. I wanted to clean it up gradually but I am unable to delete files through Parallels and the shared folders (that's how I "mount" my external Firewire drives). Is my only solution to dump everything on my Mac and then format that drive? Speaking of formatting, one of my drives is a dual Linux-MS-DOS partition and since Mac OS X doesn't recognize the Linux partitions, I cannot look at the drive on Parallels neither can I erase and format that disk (I don't think I have any valuables on the Linux side). Is my only solution to install a linux VM and deal with that drive under Linux? Thanks a lot for your help.
Guest OS's don't talk directly to physical disks. You can read and write FAT32 disks in OSX, and read but not write NTFS disks. If you have the space on your internal disk, or another external, you can format (if necessary) for the Mac (or FAT32 if none of your files are over 4 gb),copy the files there, and edit from OSX. If OSX can't read the disk you can't read it in Parallels. Physical partition access is supposed to be on the roadmap, so if you can wait, the situation may change.
