Using Spotlight With Virtual Hard Disks

Spotlight is a Mac OS X utility that enables you to search for the items stored on your Mac. To be able to search for the items stored on your virtual machines hard disks, you can enable Spotlight support in Parallels Desktop.

Warning: Using Spotlight may slightly reduce the performance of your virtual machine and your Mac.

Enabling Spotlight support in Parallels Desktop

1. Choose Configure from the Virtual Machine menu to open Virtual Machine Configuration.
2. In the Shared Folders settings pane, select the Add virtual disks to Spotlight search option.

   Note: The changes will come into effect after you shut down your virtual machine or restart it.

Using Spotlight to search your virtual hard disks

1. In a Finder window, open the virtual hard disk you want to search by clicking its icon in the sidebar.

   Note: If the disk is not mounted in the Finder, refer to Browsing Virtual Hard Disks in Finder for the instructions on mounting virtual hard disks to Mac OS X.

2. Click inside the Search field in the Finder window or click the Spotlight icon on the Finder menubar.
3. Type the name of the item to search and press Enter to start the search.
4. The search results will be displayed in the Finder window.

Please send us your feedback on this help page