You cannot install or access an external FireWire or a USB hard disk drive in Virtual PC for Mac (871152)

SYMPTOMS

When you use Microsoft Virtual PC for Mac version 6.1 or Connectix Virtual PC for Mac version 6.0, you cannot access an external FireWire or USB hard disk drive. Additionally, the virtual machine or the Virtual PC program may stop responding when you try to install an USB external hard disk drive to the guest operating system.

CAUSE

This issue occurs because a Virtual PC virtual machine does not emulate a FireWire port. Additionally, this issue may occur for USB external disk drives if the device or the device drivers are not compatible with Virtual PC or if the hard disk drive is formatted to use the NTFS file system.

You cannot use a hard disk drive that has been formatted to use NTFS with the Mac OS X 10.2 and earlier versions or with the Mac OS 9 operating systems. The computer may stop responding if you try to mount an NTFS drive on your Mac computer. You must reformat the hard disk to use the Mac OS format, the Mac OS Extended format, or the MS-DOS format. For more information about how to reformat an NTFS formatted hard disk to make the hard disk usable with Mac OS X 10.2 and earlier versions or Mac OS 9, contact Apple Care support.

Mac OS X 10.3 and later versions support the mounting of an NTFS drive on the Mac computer as read only.

WORKAROUND

To work around this issue, share the external drive so that it can be used in Windows. To do this, follow these steps:

Verify that the external drive is mounted on your Macintosh Desktop.
Start Virtual PC, and then start the virtual machine where you want to attach the external drive.
Click Edit, and then click Windows XP Settings.
Click Shared Folders.
Click to select the Removable media check box.
Click Restart.

The drive will appear in My Computer in Windows as a shared drive.

MORE INFORMATION

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