Accessing 2nd Hard Drive in Parallels

[Razaki]

Hi all - I am running a Windows 7 Professional Boot Camp instance on Parallels 6 and I am having a problem seeing my second hard drive in Optibay.

Setup:
Snow Leopard / Windows 7 installed on SSD (Main slot) via BootCamp, Data is on my HDD (ExFat) in Optibay

Symptoms:
1) Booting into Snow Leopard, I can see the HDD and all its data
2) Booting into Windows 7 via Boot Camp, I can see the HDD and all its data
3) Booting into Snow Leopard and run Parallel to load up Windows, Snow Leopard can see the HDD and its data, but Windows cannot see the HDD at all.

I'm new to the mac world (loving it), any help would be much appreciated!

 

[Razaki]

I tried to add the HDD in Parallel configuration panel, of course, but I am encountering a problem mounting the HDD. I chose the Boot Camp partition as the source and found the HDD for me to add, however, I received the following error message:

Failed to configure the Boot Camp partition's hard disk.
A disk configuration error has occurred. Make sure that you have read/write permissions for the disk.

Error: PRL_ERR_DISK_FILE_OPEN_ERROR (0x80021014)
Path: '/Users/Razaki/Documents/Parallels/Windows 7.pvm/WDC WD5000BEKT-75KA9T0 (disk1).hdd'

 

[Razaki]

Guess I have it working for now. Instead of figuring out how to mount the physical drive to the Windows partition in Parallel, I just shared a folder (the drive in this case) from the Mac side and it has no problem read / writing to it.

If anybody has a better way to do it, please let me know.

 

[pazz]

Razaki, this is quite simple and straight forward.

Open Parallels and open Virtual Machine -> Configure.

Then open the "Options" tab and from the left hand menu select "Sharing".

Click "Custom Folders" and point to your 2nd optibay drive.

Done, should parallels should now see the drive through My Computer.