Mounted virtual Windows disk disappeared/won't come back

Discussion in 'Installation and Configuration of Parallels Desktop' started by Brianus, Apr 15, 2008.

  1. Brianus

    Brianus Bit poster

    Messages:
    9
    Hi, I just installed Parallels on a Vista Ultimate (NOT SP1) Boot Camp partition and have been using it for a few hours. I had it set to mount "All Windows Disks" in the virtual machine editor, and it did so, but it disappeared after a few hours. After restarting the VM, it's still not there even though I verified that the settings were correct. Even attempting to unmount and remount all windows disks doesn't help. Where did my disk go? Other than that I'm having no issues with Parallels or the VM.

    Two related questions -- (1) is it possible to change the way the mounted disks are named? That "[C']" before the hard drive name is a little obnoxious and un-mac-like, I'd prefer just using the VM or volume name.

    (2) I noticed when I installed Parallels that my Boot Camp partition no longer shows up on the Desktop as a hard drive, whereas when it was just Boot Camp it did. Is this the expected behavior? Is there a reason for it?
     
  2. buckyDuck

    buckyDuck Junior Member

    Messages:
    16
    Hi,

    first: my Bootcamp partition (also with Vista installed on it) is disappearing from the desktop as well when I run Parallels to boot from it. I wondered about it, but never felt like this is a bug (or a feature :0)

    I guess this has some technical background, as Parallels is mounting this disk itself in order to run its installation as a "virtual computer", so OSX has no longer access.

    ... just a try to explain at least ... :0)

    Second: the discription of a harddrive named [C:] is just appearing when I run a non-Bootcamp installation (in my case its a Windows XP I run totally as a VM)...

    This is just a "virtual disk" named according to the name of the VM itself plus adding the drive-letter [C].


    cheers
    dennis
     
  3. Brianus

    Brianus Bit poster

    Messages:
    9
    Oh I know, the [C] thing is intentional, I just wish they gave the option to have it named without the [C] because it just doesn't look good on a Mac.

    The random disappearance of my "[C] Win HD" volume while the VM is running seems to have ceased for now.. it now unmounts only when the VM stops. Odd
     
  4. buckyDuck

    buckyDuck Junior Member

    Messages:
    16
    "...I just wish they gave the option to have it named without the [C] because it just doesn't look good on a Mac..."

    yeh right, I forgot about important cosmetics like this (caugh ...) ... sorry ...

    dennis
     
  5. rptb1

    rptb1 Member

    Messages:
    32
    My Windows C drive also unmounts from Mac OS X after a while without warning. The only way to get it back is to shut down Windows completely ("turn off" the VM) and restart it. This is very inconvenient!

    Has anyone else seen this behaviour? Any workarounds?
     
  6. John@Parallels

    John@Parallels Forum Maven

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    6,333
  7. rptb1

    rptb1 Member

    Messages:
    32
    Thanks for replying, John. I downloaded and installed MacFUSE-Core-10.5-1.5.1.dmg as you suggested, and rebooted Mac OS, restarted Parallels, etc. The C drive umounted after just one minute this time!

    My system.log shows

    2008-06-10 11:18:31 kernel MacFUSE: force ejecting (no response from user space 5)

    This is completely repeatable. In particular, I can get it to happen very quickly by doing something FS intensive such as:

    cd /annoying/place/parallels/decided/to/mount/C/my/sourcecode
    ctags --excmd=number --tag-relative=no --fields=+a+m+n+S -R `pwd`

    (The ctags command needed to set up tags for BBEdit.) Parallels is running Windows XP SP2 on a Boot Camp partition, just booted, with no applications running. It seems like doing anything non-trivial causes it to unmount quickly. Even just editing files with BBEdit causes it to unmount sometimes.
     
  8. Specimen

    Specimen Product Expert

    Messages:
    3,242
    I don't get it, Parallels Desktop in the last 2 releases (5600 and 5604) has come with MacFuse 1.3(.1) both of these releases have been released after the availability of MacFuse 1.5(.1).

    Now John is recommending people to install 1.5(.1). Does this mean that the MacFuse version that comes with Parallels is outdated? On the other hand maybe 1.3 is a well tested version and 1.5 is not, so does that mean that these people John is recommending the latest MacFuse release are beta testing the interoperability between the latest MacFuse and Parallels?

    Reading MacFuse's changelog gives me the impression that the 1.5 is quite an improvement over 1.3 with lots of important bug fixes.

    Side Note: I've been using MacFuse 1.5.1 since the day after it was released (April 28).
     
    Last edited: Jun 10, 2008
  9. John@Parallels

    John@Parallels Forum Maven

    Messages:
    6,333
    Did you receive message Operation system is too old, please downgrade MacFuse?
    If yes you need to reinstall Parallels Desktop
     
  10. rptb1

    rptb1 Member

    Messages:
    32
    No, I received no such message. I'm running Mac OS X 10.5.3 with all Apple's updates, Parallels Desktop 3.0 build 5600, and Windows XP Home Version 2002 SP 2.
     
  11. John@Parallels

    John@Parallels Forum Maven

    Messages:
    6,333
    Error seems to be related to MacFuse functionality
    http://macfuse.googlecode.com/svn-history/r964/trunk/core/10.4/fusefs/fuse_ipc.c

    if (kr != KERN_SUCCESS) {
    /* force ejection if we couldn't show the dialog */
    IOLog("MacFUSE: force ejecting (no response from user space %d)\n",
    kr);
    rf = kKUNCOtherResponse;
    }


    Try following
    in Terminal
    sudo kextstat | grep -i fusefs and check version should be (1.5.x)
    if you cannot see try following
    sudo kextload /Library/Filesystems/fusefs.fs/Support/fusefs.kext/
     
  12. Specimen

    Specimen Product Expert

    Messages:
    3,242
    Or just check the version of /Library/Filesystems/fusefs.fs using 'Get Info' from the Finder. :)
     
  13. rptb1

    rptb1 Member

    Messages:
    32
    rb@Crane$ sudo /usr/sbin/kextstat | grep -i fusefs
    106 0 0x39076000 0x12000 0x11000 com.google.filesystems.fusefs (1.5.1) <7 6 5 4 2>

    I'm a bit puzzled as to why we're spending so long establishing that I correctly ran the MacFUSE installer as you suggested. Does this often go wrong?

    It's clear from the MacFUSE source code that it's trying and failing to say this:

    #define FUSE_DAEMON_TIMEOUT_ALERT_MESSAGE '
    "There was a timeout waiting for the file system to respond. You can " '
    "eject this volume immediately, but unsaved changes may be lost."

    It's a user space filesystem provided (as far as I can tell) by this process:

    rb 5747 0.0 0.1 81444 1564 ?? S 11:43am 0:00.04 /Applications/Parallels/Parallels Desktop.app/Contents/Resources/vfstool 27 /private/tmp/5735/C [C] My Boot Camp true false 5735

    So it seems like this process is timing out and failing to service filesystem requests. There could be a bug in vfstool, or it might not be getting processor time, or the timeout might be too short for a loaded system or heavy FS activity.

    I don't know what machines you guys have, but I'm on an iMac 2GHz Intel Core Duo with 2G RAM. Perhaps if you try a similar or lower spec machine (in your test lab?) and load it up then you'll see these timeouts too.
     
  14. John@Parallels

    John@Parallels Forum Maven

    Messages:
    6,333
    No, it doesn't related to Mac power, It works good on my old MB 1,83 C2D
    Let us try following steps:
    1. Install 5608 , download it from http://www.parallels.com/en/products/desktop/
    2. Reinstall Tools in VM
    3. Disable mounting all Windows disks, start stop VM
    4. in Terminal
    cd Documents
    rm -r .parallels-vm-directory

    5. Delete Windows Disks folder from VM folder
    6. in Terminal
    cd /private/tmp
    rm -r [0-9]*
    7. Start VM and check
     
  15. rptb1

    rptb1 Member

    Messages:
    32
    Hi John. Thank for your continued help with this. I'm away now for a week and won't be able to try this until I get back. I will certainly be trying it though, and will let you know what happens.
     
  16. rptb1

    rptb1 Member

    Messages:
    32
    Hello John.

    I followed the steps you suggested and have been using the mounted Boot Camp volume without problems since Monday. I've been making fairly heavy use of it -- searching, creating tags files, and editing Photoshop files -- and it hasn't dismounted once. So it looks like it might have been fixed. (But bear in mind that I still have the MacFUSE 1.5.1 update installed.)

    Thanks for your help.
     
  17. rptb1

    rptb1 Member

    Messages:
    32
    I spoke too soon. Spontaneous unmounting during a multi-file search from BBEdit. Same message in system.log:

    Jun 25 11:22:20 Crane kernel[0]: MacFUSE: force ejecting (no response from user space 5)

    I'll keep trying and let you know how often this happens.
     
  18. rptb1

    rptb1 Member

    Messages:
    32
    The disk now dismounts much more rarely -- about once a day. It still dismounts when I'm doing things like search operations which process many files quickly. It's still very inconvenient (it costs me about 20 minutes of work time each time I have to reboot Windows) but at least it's not as frequent.
     
  19. Specimen

    Specimen Product Expert

    Messages:
    3,242
    There's a new MacFuse version out.
     
  20. rptb1

    rptb1 Member

    Messages:
    32
    Just to let you know this is still happening quite regularly. Today, even shutting down and restarting Parallels failed to bring the disk back. These messages were on the console after the restart.

    2008-07-24 12:50:54 [0x0-0xdc0dc].com.parallels.desktop[5999] QFSFileEngine::eek:pen: No file name specified
    2008-07-24 12:51:11 [0x0-0xdc0dc].com.parallels.desktop[5999] Error disk change state flag to set
    2008-07-24 12:51:11 [0x0-0xdc0dc].com.parallels.desktop[5999] Error disk suspend parameter flag to set
    2008-07-24 12:51:11 [0x0-0xdc0dc].com.parallels.desktop[5999] Error disk change state flag to set

    A second and third complete shutdown and restart of Parallels didn't help. It looks like I'll have to restart my whole machine.
     

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