PHD guiding/ASCOM on a virtual windows guest

[FarmerBen]

I'm hoping someone can give me a few tips as I'm bruising my forehead bashing it against the table.

I'm trying to get guiding working for my LX200GPS with PHD on a virtual windows machine that's running on an OS X host.

Why? well that's a long story. I want to use an Orion Starshoot Autoguider (relatively cheap) but this will only work with windows. PHD Guiding supports this camera on windows. PHD Guiding also supports my telescope using ASCOM drivers on windows. So... it all seemed so simple.. I've set up a virtual windows XPsp2 machine with Parallels, I have installed PHD, the ASCOM 5 platform and driver for my scope.

I use a USB 2 Serial adapter to talk to the scope from my macbook (works fine using scopedriver on OSX). I have presented the adapter to the virtual machine but Windows is saying there was a problem with the usb device. PHD Guiding allows me to select my telescope but then tells me it can't communicate with it. Obviously related to the windows problem with the device.

So.. what am I missing? All the hardware is working, but something is problematic with either the OSX, parallels, or windows side of things.

Thanks for any and all suggestions and I'd be most interested to hear form others who do a similar thing.
Cheers,
Ben.

[tlgerdes]

Best suggestion in the world..... ditch Parallels !!! and install Fusion.

Suppose you cant guess who i work for?:P

Trev.

[FarmerBen]

Thanks Trev, while I can't yet discount Parallels, it's always been great for me in the past. Never had an issue with it.
Cheers,
Ben.

[tlgerdes]

I am not trying to flog the horse, but a google of "Parallels USB problem" reveals 300,000 plus hits, the same "Fusion USB problem" reveals 0 hits.

Might be worth looking for the error on the Parallels website or google for it, as it could be something more generic.

Trev

[mozzie]

hi ben i bashed my head for 3 months same as you usb fine no communication my prob was to set comm ports to no.2 and ascom to the same port and everything worked fine
mozzie

[FarmerBen]

Thanks mozzie you solved my problem, indirectly. I was going through and rechecking everything for the umteenth time when I realised I still had the pl2303 driver for the usb2serial adapter loaded in OS X. The host will grab the device and not allow the guest to use it. I removed the driver from OS X and now everything is working fine in my virtual windows machine.

Now I just need to wait till the Starshoot arrives and I'm in business!!

Cheers,
Ben.