Vista booting oddness...

01-26-2007, 12:23 AM #1
gabester Junior Member Join: Jan 2007 Posts: 3	Vista booting oddness... I've installed Vista Enterprise followed by the Parallels tools (first beta 2.5 v 3036 and now 3120) 2007 versions of Office, Project, and Visio, followed by Adobe Reader 8. Now, when I launch my Vista VM, it starts to boot but hangs while still on the initial 640x480 green progress bar loading screen (i.e. after about 10-15 seconds.) It will just sit there, the green progress bar frozen, for a very long time. I had been stopping the VM and restarting with the accompanying "error on last startup, do you want to safe boot?" questions coming up. Haven't been able to fix my issue on what is pretty much a plain install (but then I'm not really sure where to start with this new Windows monster...) Recently I tried quitting Parallels instead of stopping the VM. When I relaunched Parallels the VM resumed its suspended state and proceeded to boot normally... as far as I can tell! Is this the electronic equivalent of giving a balky PC a good kick to get it running again? Any thoughts on how to fix this? I need to put this VM on a machine that has the standard 1970 version of Parallels instead of the beta... g=

01-26-2007, 12:23 AM

gabester
Junior Member

Join: Jan 2007
Posts: 3

Vista booting oddness...

I've installed Vista Enterprise followed by the Parallels tools (first beta 2.5 v 3036 and now 3120) 2007 versions of Office, Project, and Visio, followed by Adobe Reader 8. Now, when I launch my Vista VM, it starts to boot but hangs while still on the initial 640x480 green progress bar loading screen (i.e. after about 10-15 seconds.) It will just sit there, the green progress bar frozen, for a very long time.

I had been stopping the VM and restarting with the accompanying "error on last startup, do you want to safe boot?" questions coming up. Haven't been able to fix my issue on what is pretty much a plain install (but then I'm not really sure where to start with this new Windows monster...)

Recently I tried quitting Parallels instead of stopping the VM. When I relaunched Parallels the VM resumed its suspended state and proceeded to boot normally... as far as I can tell!

Is this the electronic equivalent of giving a balky PC a good kick to get it running again?

Any thoughts on how to fix this? I need to put this VM on a machine that has the standard 1970 version of Parallels instead of the beta...
g=

01-29-2007, 12:58 PM #2
purpanther Junior Member Join: Sep 2006 Posts: 9	I'm having the same boot problem with Vista Enterprise but am not able to get it to boot at all.

01-29-2007, 03:41 PM #3
ciparis Junior Member Join: May 2006 Posts: 16	I got Vista to boot by changing acceleration from "high" to "normal".

01-30-2007, 10:59 PM #4
theorioles33 Junior Member Join: Nov 2006 Posts: 12	@ciparis - Thanks for tip! That did the trick. My Vista Home Premium install stopped working after the first round of updates (I should have known). Changed acceleration to normal and all is well for now. Thanks! :) Ron

01-31-2007, 01:14 AM

dkp
Senior Member

Join: May 2006
Posts: 1,416

Quote:

Originally Posted by theorioles33

@ciparis - Thanks for tip! That did the trick. My Vista Home Premium install stopped working after the first round of updates (I should have known). Changed acceleration to normal and all is well for now. Thanks! :)

Ron

Now that you have a healthy configuration with apps installed this would be a very good time to back it all up to DVD or CD. And each time you update the VM OS or add new apps, back it up. Your entire Windows world is spinning away in a single file in OS X and vulnerable to all manner of corruption as you experiment with it. Don't forget to update your VM for the new daylight savings time change schedule in March or your clock will be off by an hour.

01-31-2007, 09:15 AM #6
theorioles33 Junior Member Join: Nov 2006 Posts: 12	Way ahead of you on the backup my friend! :) I have learned the hard way. Thanks!

01-31-2007, 09:37 AM #7
Jim Hollcraft Junior Member Join: Nov 2006 Posts: 2	Corrupted Vista Image For me, anything but a perfect shutdown has a high risk of rendering the Vista image unbootable. I've had to restore a backup about once a week to get Vista to boot. This appears to be a parallels issue since on raw metal Vista is stable and hard to corrupt. One good thing is that the unbootable image can be mounted by the restored image and data files recovered.

01-31-2007, 12:52 PM #8
RobCon Junior Member Join: Jan 2007 Posts: 2	I was just about to start a thread on this very subject. Thanks for that tip ciparis. It worked on my seemingly f'd up image. I've actually had this problem with every version of Vista that I've used (Beta, RC 1, Home Basic). The fact that it happened with the one I actually paid for was really annoying. Just a question though: What's the actual downside to setting acceleration to 'normal' instead of 'high'? Does it get noticably slower or what?

01-31-2007, 12:52 PM

RobCon
Junior Member

Join: Jan 2007
Posts: 2

I was just about to start a thread on this very subject. Thanks for that tip ciparis. It worked on my seemingly f'd up image.

I've actually had this problem with every version of Vista that I've used (Beta, RC 1, Home Basic). The fact that it happened with the one I actually paid for was really annoying.

Just a question though: What's the actual downside to setting acceleration to 'normal' instead of 'high'? Does it get noticably slower or what?

01-31-2007, 02:47 PM #9
JesseRPI Junior Member Join: Nov 2006 Posts: 6	I've had the same exact issue! Thanks so much for the tip, but as others asked, what is the impact of "Normal" over "High"? I hope this is fixed, and that Direct3D is added so we can use Aero.

02-01-2007, 03:02 AM #10
NJRonbo Member Join: Feb 2007 Posts: 42	Should Vista be backed up using a Windows backup program in VISTA or backed up through an OS X backup program? I ask this because I have not yet experimented with adding an external drive to my VM to send backup to.

02-01-2007, 08:48 AM #11
JesseRPI Junior Member Join: Nov 2006 Posts: 6	I've been backing mine up by copying the directory containing my virtual HDD's to an external drive every now and then. Has worked pretty well, saving me a few headaches.

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