Parallels Desktop Build 3188 - external hard drive issue seems fixed
A while ago I posted Parallels RC2, Boot Camp, Windows XP, OS X - One Happy Family On My Mac, which was about installing a single Windows XP image and being able to run it either through bootcamp or parallels.
One of the issues I came across was that Parallels wouldn’t start up if you had an NTFS/FAT32 (aka Windows formatted) external drive attached - such as an ipod or a USB keyring drive. If a drive was plugged in, Parallels would refuse to start up and would display the cryptic message "More than one Windows partitions are found. This is not a standard Boot Camp configuration". Judging by the number of Google search hits I get searching for that term, it seems a lot of people have had the same issue (the work around was just to unplug the external drive before starting Parallels).
The good news is that Parallels Desktop Build 3188 has been released, and this issue seems to be fixed. There is probably a whole bunch of other cool stuff in there as well, but I couldn’t see any obvious release notes, and I don’t have any worries apart from that.