Amazon Unbox under Parallels

I'm trying to get Amazon Unbox working on my MacBook under Parallels. The first problem I encountered was that I didnt have enough disk space for the movie downloads. This is understandable, in that I wanted to keep the Windows partition just big enough for the OS and the odd application.

The first remedy I tried was changing the settings to point to a folder on my "OS X" partition, which to Parallels looks like a network drive. I didn't get far: first Unbox inexplicably wouldn't let me save the settings, but then ultimately gave me an error message suggesting movies can only be downloaded to local drives.

The next approach was increasing the size of my Parallels partition. A little Googling quickly scared me away, however: it sounds like a bit of a painful process.

The next strategy: add another virtual hard drive to Parallels. Problem number one: I couldn't figure out how to edit the virtual machine settings because I had configured Parallels to start the VM automatically upon launching and quit once the VM quit, and a VM's settings can only be modified when the VM isn't running. A lot of Googling led me to a solution: if the command (apple/clover) key is pressed and held immediately after launching Parallels it does not automatically start the VM.

Once I got the VM settings opened, it was easy enough to specify that I wanted another hard drive. But when I launched the VM no second hard disk appeared in "My Computer". More Googling, and I found a solution: the drive has to be formatted. In Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management I went through the Dynamic wizard that came up automatically. Then I selected something like Action > All Tasks > Add volume and went through that wizard. That did the trick.

Now I've changed the Amazon Unbox settings to point to my "E:" drive...but the movies I bought are still refusing to download. I'll give them time...



The user interface made it look easy enough