To: R. Peter DeLong (KB Forum ID
I have struggled with updating a dual boot BC/PD XP-SP2 to XP-SP3 for over 22 man-hours and have had no success. In my particular case, I had attempted to update to SP3 via the correct procedure of using a native BC environment. You are not alone, several others have also had the same net result when applying KB 5447 (Forum userids users zoozie, jakoban , Cocoa Beast, TimeLordBob , pkasin, ... etc...).
I have already submitted User Problem Ticket #585060 on 9/5/08 which was eventually "Closed" by Parallels Support with the following Parallels comment: "The issue you are talking about is known issue and we have plenty of information how to fix it in our knowledge base articles, described procedures are working fine." (No need to repeat the details of several exchanges I had with them in that ticket since it is mostly a rehash of what I had already stated in this forum).
I resubmitted a new Problem Ticket #601792 on 10/19/08 which I have just now escalated since it has been a week since I gave Parallels support my phone number and no one has yet called me or sent me any further email. I had also sent email directly to (Parallels Vice President, Virtualization and Tools) and other Parallels engineers I happen to know in Technical Sales Support to draw their attention to this support issue. As a result I received sincere email from various engineers trying to reproduce the problem, but with no such luck. The SP3 update (when performed correctly under native BC) completed in their environments and only steps #10 and #11 og KB 5447 needed to be applied after the upgrade. The end result was they had no corruption of either the PD or Native boot.
I have already asked Parallels several times to include a technote in the PD v3.0 Release Notes defining the proper steps for upgrading BC XP-SP2 to SP3. Lets see if they are willing to do it in the future.
It is clear the latest production PD release (build 5608) has a subtle bug when upgrading from SP2 to SP3 that only a subset of the users are encountering (most probably a Windows Registry related bug, though I have no proof,). I know of users who have not had any problems in installing and running build 5608 on the an already upgraded XP-SP3 BC environment. Thus I think the additional recommended step to KB 5447 of first completely un-installing PD on both Mac OS and XP (as described in http://kb.parallels.com/en/4790) and re-installing PD on MAC OS before attempting to boot XP back up under PD may be a reasonable fix to your problem. Unfortunately, I can longer afford to waist time on this (see my prior posts) to check if this actually works. I am content to restore my system back to my original XP-SP2 backup image and stay at SP2 until some other brave soul pioneers the solution to this problem.
If you do attempt to include KB 4790 as additional steps before KB5447 step #10, please let this forum know of your results!!!!!
If it does work, I suggest Parallels recommend in their procedures for updating BC XP-SP2 to SP3 that PD should first be completely un-installed (ala KB4790) prior to attempting the XP-SP2 upgrade to SP3. The Release Notes should warn of the possible consequences of BC corruption if PD is not un-installed.
Good luck,
Krel
Last edited by a moderator: Nov 8, 2008