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I am running Parallels 9 with Windows 7 on a 2011 27" iMac with 20gb of ram, i5 3.1 processor, etc. On the windows side, I have both a Home (//psf, though sometimes loads as Y:/ after a while) and Host(Z:/). What is the difference? Am I supposed to be able to access files the same way through both? I guess they point to different levels of my Mac Drive - the Host the whole drive, the home just my user folder. But why? Why are they both their? What is their purpose?

Note: I am currently having trouble saving ArcMap outputs to a file geodatabase which I had created from Windows on the Home drive (//psf - Y:/) and am wondering if this trouble could be related to differences in accessing or creating files between these two drives on the virtual machine. SO, these problems prompted this question.

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  • Yeah, the machine I am doing all of this on. – traggatmot May 5 '15 at 18:47
  • Sounds like a Parallels and or Windows issue, probably nothing directly to do with OS X. Have you tried using Parallels Support? – user3439894 May 5 '15 at 18:50
  • Yes, but I'm out of the 30 days free support chat/phone support and thought someone on here might have experienced a similar issue. Whether or not the problem is resolved, I still want to know the difference between these two drives. – traggatmot May 5 '15 at 18:52
  • Are they both pointing to the same location? – user3439894 May 5 '15 at 18:54
  • I guess they point to different levels of my Mac Drive - the Host the whole drive, the home just my user folder. But why? Why are they both their? What is their purpose? – traggatmot May 5 '15 at 18:57
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Though your Parallels tech support service has expired, they do have Parallels Desktop for Mac forums, where you can ask for help, and find previous answers.

In particular, I found a relevant answer for you by eiraf-kr in the Parallels Forums.

A user's "Home" folder is a common feature of Unix-y OSes, such as Unix, BSD, Linux, and OSX (since it's built up from a BSD core). You won't find any "Home" folder in Windows -- the closest you get is C:\Documents and Settings[username]\ instead.

When you share your "Home" folder from your host Mac to the guest Windows machine, I think there's an option to have Parallels map the shared folders to Windows drives. (I say "I think" because I'm not in front of my Mac at the moment.) They'll then show up as extra drives in Windows Explorer, such as K: or R:.

If you don't opt to have Parallels map your shared folders, I believe they'll appear under Network Places in the locations pane on the left of an Explorer window (this is for XP; I assume Win7 has something similar). Alternately, you can type \psf\Home into the Explorer URL bar. You can then opt to manually map such network paths to Windows drives for easier access. I've mapped my "Home" folder to the Z: drive in Windows, for instance.

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