[ibook_steve]

Have I mentioned how much I hate Windows?

I recently purchased a Samsung S2 portable drive that mounts and works fine in OS X. I'm trying to connect it to my Parallels XP SP3 VM, formatting it as NTFS if I can. The drive shows up in Device Manager when I add it to the VM, but it does not get assigned a drive letter. In Drive Management, the disk does not show up as initialized. When I try to initialize it, I get an unspecified error as to why it wouldn't initialize, which provides no information at all on how to fix the problem. Argh!

I tried downloading the Samsung formatting utility, but it says that it fails when I try to format the drive as well!

So I'm basically stuck. NTFS-3G was able to format the drive on the Mac side, but it still wouldn't show up on the Windows side.

Any other ideas?

Thanks,
Steve

[ghporter]

Which version of Parallels? I always had problems with the USB virtualization in Parallels 2 (and I haven't gotten around to upgrading to the latest, let alone any in between then and now).

[ibook_steve]

The latest: Parallels 5. But I don't think this has to do with Parallels because I've had no problems with other drives connected to the VM.

I've been waiting for a response, but since I didn't get one, I'll note that I solved this, but only by connecting the drive to another PC and initializing. When I brought it back to the VM, I formatted NTFS no problem. Strangely, though, when the drive is mounted in OS X, it is reported as FAT32, not NTFS.

Steve