I booted Parallels from a "Bart PE" ISO image that includes Symantec Ghost 8. I then booted a PC using a CD-ROM made from that image, and used Ghost to clone the PC's drive to the Parallels VM virtual disk. The master disk has two partitions; a 31MB "dell utility" partition, and the remaining disk as an NTFS partition, with XP-SP2 installed on it. The ghost operation completed without error. I rebooted the Parallels VM. The XP boot logo was displayed for a few seconds, and then Parallels threw an error and emailed a report of the crash. The crash appens regardless of the "acceleration level" in Parallels, or whether I start XP in "safe mode" or normally.
Why on earth would you expect that to work? Ghosting one machine to another requires identical or nearly identical hardware. Even if the Parallels VM were identical to one PC, it would automatically be non-identical to all the others. An OS has to be installed on the target hardware. The install detects the hardware and installs appropriate drivers from a truly huge library of possibilities. Get one wrong (ie incompatible) and you get a crash. The real newsworthy item would be trying this and actually having it work -- sort of the man bites dog news story.
It would be one thing if it failed to boot. It's another thing entirely for it to cause Parallels to error out. The guest OS should not be able to kill Parallels.
Can you offer a suggestion on how a Ghost'ed image could be made to work within a VM? Yes the hardware and emulated hardware will be completely different, but surely there's something that can be done... I dunno, re-running the Windows XP install disk and reinstall/repair the Ghosted OS?? Booting in Safe Mode?? I have no idea, but if you can offer some advice that would really help.
See if you can boot in Safe Mode If you can go into device manager and delete hardware devices like video, network, keyboard, USB. Just basically mass dump all devices. Then you need to restart and XP should start re-installing them. I have done this moving Image from PC to PC, but you out there man ;-) good luck
