[scalleia]

Hi,

Sorry if this has already been addressed however I have searched the various forums and I am still confused. I am a new Mac user and have an iMac 24 with a 250gig internal drive and a 500g Firewire drive. I wish to run some windows apps. but want to preserve as much space on the internal drive for Mac apps. I have installed Bootcamp and created a 15gig Fat32 partition on my internal mac drive. I have loaded MS Win. XP Pro on this partition. I have then installed Parallels 3106 Beta and pointed it to use the Bootcamp install of Windows XP. I have also used parallels to create a virtual HD on the external firewire drive (sorry can't remember the size, but it was expanding), and this is called WinHardDisk2.hdd. I can see this if I use finder under mac and browse to the Firewire drive.

My desire is to run Parallels off the Bootcamp copy of Windows so that I don't have 2 installs of Windows on my HD (thus wasting space), and install Windows applications on the Parallels Virtual HD that is on the external drive.


Everything seems to work very well, and I must say I am thrilled with Parallels so far. Here are my questions/problems:

1) I cannot seem to see the virtual hard drive when in windows under parallels. When I install an app it is going on my Windows C: drive which is on the Mac HD partition. I cannot see the virtual drive either under MyComputer or Explorer when running windows VM. How do I resolve this ? Am I right in saying that I should be able to install virtual HD's on external drives and then actual applications on these virtual HD's ?

2) Given that I can do 1) above I assume then that any windows applications installed on the Parallels virtual HD will not be accessable when running Windows under Bootcamp. Is this correct ??

3) I am worried that my initial choice of Partition size and type (fat 32) may have been incorrect. Is this partition likely to become too small (it has 7.3g free at present), and I worry that Windows may require more. I know this is a hard Q to answer without me specifying what I intend to run under Windows. If I can install apps. on the parallels virtual HD then I guess this is not such a big issue, but if I cannot I can see it getting a bit tight. In peoples opinion would I be best to start again wioth a bigger Bootcamp partition before a re-install is too much of a pain.

Anyway thanks for your help/advice.

Cheers,

Simon