XLDR ATA Error

HISTORY:
My 4yr old Dell Laptop display adapter died a horrible death and after disabling it I can JUST get into windows on a good day and with the wind in the right direction. Rather than paying the £400+ charge from Dell I opted to replace. Hearing good things abut Mac reliability and quality plus Parallels I figured I would go all out. So all in all, I am a total Mac noob.

My laptop came with Windows XP Pro (OEM) and I haave no install disk - But I do have obviously the license stuck to the bottom of the laptop.

After a couple of false starts trying to transfer my entire HD using the USB cable, I finally got everything stored on an external HD. When running the Transporter on my Mac, the import completes and I run the VM for the first time. I get a dialogue saying configuring the VM with processes 1 of 4. After a while of configuring (still in process 1) I get a black dos screen and a Parallel drop-down appears reporting:

Clicking okay I can see the following error in the black DOS-type screen: [XLDR] ATA error_

Hunting around google I found this on the Parallels forum: http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=10566 where although the problem isnt reported resolved, I used is as a reference. As I dont have a disk, I borrowed a Windows XP Pro CD from work to see if I could use if to repair. I have now had a few attempts at running the configuration again and setting the boot sequence to CD first and forcing the VM to use my Macs CD drive - Each time I get the message:

and the same Parallels drop-down as above. I just can not get past the error. In spite of me forcing the the VM settings to my CD drive, if I look at the settings of the VM window that gets opened the settings say my VM CD device is prl-tools-win-iso. With this in mind I am not sure if the CD is being used properly (although I do hear is spinning during the process), or the CD is being rejected because its a retail CD not OEM.

All the general help I can find on google with this error type leads to trying to repair the installation using a disk so I am very stuck at this point and any help in recovering my HD would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
FG

 

Hi

Sorry for long delay.

You need to boot from Windows XP boot CD. When message "Press any key to boot from CD" will be printed you need to press any key (space for example).
In Recovery Console you should use command fixmbr to restore standard Windows MBR record and command fixboot to restore standard Windows boot sector.

p.s. About "Press any key to boot from CD......[XLDR] ATA error_" message: it looks like you didn't press key or key event was not delivered into guest. If you pressed key to boot from CD and it was ignored, please generate a problem report.

 

Hi Stuw,
Thanks for the response - Unfortunately I do not get the opportunity to press a key before the error appears - its instant. I sat again after your response and had another go - not taking my eyes off the screen for a moment but no... While configuring I get a lot of Parallels functionality graphics scrolling and then after about 5 minutes the graphics go and I get the drop-down message and the black screen behind already has the error showing.

 

To avoid configuring step do the following, open DiskDescriptor.xml (it's placed within .hdd bundle) and change "<CompatLevel>level2</CompatLevel>" to "<CompatLevel>level2</CompatLevel>".

 

Righto - took me a while to find. Anybody else as noobish as me looking for it might find it here or similar:

Users > [User Folder] > Documents > Parallels > [Virtual Machine Name].pvm > [Virtual Machine OS].hdd > DiskDescriptor.xml

I got through the repair and ALMOST into windows! It now requires me to activate windows which keeps failing - Both the online method and robo-phone method rejects my activation so I still cant use my old hard drive

Thanks for your help in getting be booted in - now on to MS to try to get activated again