No boot device is available after restore from Timemachine

My old iMac recently developed a fault in the SSD part of the fusion drive. After spending a few days trying to access the system and drive in various ways I finally gave up and accepted that I'd need to replace the drive and restore from a time machine backup.

After successfully replacing the SSD and restoring from my latest backup I thought everything was working correctly, but a few days later I realised the parallels VM wasn't running. When I tried to start the VM I got the initial Windows boot screen which then promptly stopped at a "No boot device is available, press Enter to continue" message, and a popup appeared at the top of the screen saying "Unable to connect Hard Disk 1. A file or device required for the operation of Hard Disk 1 does not exist or is used by another process, or you have no permission to access it. The virtual machine will continue running, but the device will be disconnected"

I turned off the VM and tried to just mount the drive but got a message that the drive was either corrupt or in use.

I then mounted the timemachine backupbundle and looked at the .hdd files inside the .pvm entries for each backup (long and tedius job). It seems that some time around May 7th 2020 something changed in my backups. In all the backups prior to and including May 7th 2020 the .hdd files are over 300GB, while all they are only between 30 and 40GB after that date. I can mount and search through all the earlier .hdd files, but all the later files give the error.

Does anyone know what's happened here, and if so, is it fixable? Can I use a combination of earlier and later backups to recreate my drive?

 

Hello, Please refer this KB article: https://kb.parallels.com/4729 to install new windows virtual machine and follow the steps from this KB article:
https://kb.parallels.com/117758 to mount the virtual hard disk from the old virtual machine and check. Thanks, McAllen.

 

Unfortunately, this didn't work. I get "Unable to connect Hard Disk 2. A file or device required for the operation of Hard Disk 1 does not exist or is used by another process, or you have no permission to access it. The virtual machine will continue running, but the device will be disconnected"