Parallels and USB Hard Drive

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I just parallels desktop for mac, and i have it running off of my boot camp partition. I want it to recognize my USB hard drive (formatted as FAT32) that I have connected to my macbook. At first it wouldn't recognize it at all, so I went into OSX and ejected the drive, then I unplugged it. I restarted Windows in Parallels, then plugged the drive back into the computer. I got a message saying that the USB device was already in use by another application. Windows started to recognize it, then it told me that the USB device may not work properly, and it still won't show up in my computer. Can anyone help me get Windows to recognize my USB HDD?

PS I have parallels set to connect with USB Devices automatically.
 

cwa107


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I just parallels desktop for mac, and i have it running off of my boot camp partition. I want it to recognize my USB hard drive (formatted as FAT32) that I have connected to my macbook. At first it wouldn't recognize it at all, so I went into OSX and ejected the drive, then I unplugged it. I restarted Windows in Parallels, then plugged the drive back into the computer. I got a message saying that the USB device was already in use by another application. Windows started to recognize it, then it told me that the USB device may not work properly, and it still won't show up in my computer. Can anyone help me get Windows to recognize my USB HDD?

PS I have parallels set to connect with USB Devices automatically.

Have you updated to the just-released new version of Parallels? We've found so far that the old production version does not automatically update. The latest version of Parallels has much better USB device support. I've yet to have any problems with it since updating. Get it here.
 
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no, that didn't work. I installed the update and it still doesn't mount in winxp, even when I unplug it and plug it back in. And now it won't even mount on my OSX
 

cwa107


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no, that didn't work. I installed the update and it still doesn't mount in winxp, even when I unplug it and plug it back in. And now it won't even mount on my OSX

Sounds like something is wrong with that drive. Have you tried it on another machine?
 
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Nevermind, the drive works fine now in Parallels, but it doesn't show up in Mac OSX. Maybe when I close Parallels, I have to unplug it and plug it back in for the mac to see it
 
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When I run parallels on my MacPro the USB device can only be captured by one OS or the other at a time. I use Parallels configured not to give USB access to the VM at startup. That way Mac OS X has control of the USB devices. When I want one in the XP VM I use the buttons at the bottom of the VM window to give the VM the desired USB device. Works flawlessly.
 
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I was having the same issue: The USB Memory Stick would get mounted on Mac, and "in use" -- so that Windows could not mount it. I got an error, something like, "the device is in use, please remove it and try again",
but because it was formated as FAT 32, it didn't show up on the Mac desktop, so how to unmount it?

Answer: Fire up Terminal, (in your applications folder) and use the command line interface to Diskutil. "diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk3", substitute your disk number.

check the listing to see which disk number is in use for the usb drive, (go by the size).

Macintosh-4:~ jjs$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *93.2 Gi disk0
1: EFI 200.0 Mi disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 92.8 Gi disk0s2
/dev/disk3
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: FDisk_partition_scheme *1.9 Gi disk3
1: Windows_FAT_32 UDISK 1.9 Gi disk3s1
acintosh-4:~ jjs$ diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk3
Unmount of all volumes on disk3 was successful
Macintosh-4:~ jjs$
now you can switch over to Parallels, and use the "Devices" menu to turn on the USB drive. all worked from there!


this site was very helpful, and has some niffty tricks to make a bootable stick!

Creating a Bootable ESXi USB Stick on Mac OS X - blog.scottlowe.org - The weblog of an IT pro specializing in virtualization, storage, and servers

Rig: MacBook Pro, OSX 10.5.6, Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac, Windows XP-Pro SP2. USB is formatted as FAT32
 

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