So you’ve installed a CentOS Server into a Parallels Virtual Machine.  You probably want to share some folders to make data transfer between The HostOS (probably your Mac) and the GuestOS (CentOS) easier.  A bit of research has led you to discover that you need to Install Parallels Tools to do this, but when you click on its icon in the bottom-right corner of your screen you are presented with the following message:

Click Continue to connect the Parallels Tools installation CD to this virtual machine.

To install Parallels Tools, open a terminal, go to the CD/DVD drive directory and run the following command as root: “sudo ./install”.

Note: In some Linux systems, you may need to unmount the installation CD and then mount it again using the following command: “mount -o exec”, and only after that install Parallels Tools.

When you click Continue nothing seems to happen, and you can’t find the CD/DVD drive directory.

That’s because the server versions of CentOS don’t automatically mount these sorts of things by default.  Assuming you have no other removable media mounted at the moment…

# mount -r -t iso9660 /dev/sr0 /mnt/

…will mount the Parallels Tools CD image (prl-tools-lin.iso) in the /mnt/ directory.

# cd /mnt/

# ls -l should show about five files, including an installer.

# ./install will run the installer which should be pretty straight forward.

If the install fails with this error:

An error occurred when downloading required components for Parallels Tools installation.
– gcc
– kernel sources
Install these components and try again.

…then you probably don’t have a network connection.

Follow the instructions here to fix your nyetwork.

Once that’s done, use yum to install the required components.

# yum install gcc kernel-devel

# ./install should now work without a problem… the Parallels Tools should get installed and folder sharing should work.

# ls -l /media/psf/ reveals the location and name of all shared folders.