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- #Windows vm on mac external drives mac os x#
- #Windows vm on mac external drives plus#
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The files are definitely there – I verified using Terminal in Mac OS. Perhaps this is something to do with Vista. It does NOT show the Desktop DF and DB files in Vista. I tried this using Parallels 3.0 build 5608 running Vista, sharing an external Firewire drive formatted HFS+. This is Phillip (the tall one) from the contra dance world. You should be able to see and navigate to the shared folder that’s located on the firewire hard drive. Open your virtual machine application to access the shared folder on the firewire drive.Īgain, using Fusion as our example, double-click a folder on the Windows desktop called VMware Shared Folders. To finalize creation of the shared folder, click OK.īefore closing the Settings window, review the Shared Folders setting to ensure that both Enable and Enable at power on are checked.ģ. Navigate to the selected folder on your external hard drive, then click the Open button to select.Įnter a name for the shared folder and place a check mark next to the Enabled button. Click on the Path option on the follow-up menu and then select Choose from the list.
![windows vm on mac external drives windows vm on mac external drives](https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/images/ovf-import.png)
#Windows vm on mac external drives plus#
Using VMWare as our example (Parallels works in a similar manner), open the Settings menu and select Add Shared Folder from the drop-down menu that is revealed when you click the plus (+) button. Configure the Windows virtual machine to use a folder on the firewire drive for sharing purposes. Tampering with the HFS+ Private Data folder is discouraged, as it could cause the drive to become unreadable.Ģ.
#Windows vm on mac external drives mac os x#
Each of these items become visible when you elect to format a drive as Mac OS X Extended and provide the Windows virtual machine with shared folder access to the root directory of the external drive.
![windows vm on mac external drives windows vm on mac external drives](https://images.macworld.co.uk/cmsdata/slideshow/3671133/parallels_windows_10_on_macbook_pro.jpg)
Additional information about the drive structure is maintained in an invisible folder called HFS+ Private Data. The desktop database is stored in two invisible files called Desktop DB and Desktop DF that are located in a volume’s root directory. Mac OS X maintains a central desktop database about the applications and documents that are located on a drive volume. While Windows will also be able to access the drive if it is formatted as Mac OS X Extended, there are strong reasons to avoid the native drive format for OS X when sharing a firewire storage device on a computer that is used to run both Mac and Windows. Use Apple’s Disk Utility to format the firewire drive as MS-DOS (FAT). Nevertheless, it is possible to configure a Windows virtual machine so that it can store and retrieve data from a firewire hard drive that is mounted on the Mac desktop.
#Windows vm on mac external drives free#
Instead, both applications support USB devices and virtual hard drives sourced from free space on the Mac host. Neither Parallels nor VMWare Fusion offer native support for firewire hard drives.