Desperate for Advice...

I have a MacBook Pro where my hard drive was partitioned with Boot Camp and using Parallels without any issues until the upgrade. From what I gather from two days of dropped calls and various bits of information which our IT guy's say is bunk, I may be sunk, but thought this may be the place to get some expert help.

I should start with my Parallels VM and the XP Operating system has been getting automatic updates and is now on Service Pack 3, but since I never boot to the Windows side of partitioned hard drive it is still with whatever version of XP Service Pack 2 that was available when the initial installation was made back in April or so, this year.

I was been sent one set of instructions from a Parallels Engineer that says the fix is to prepare and XP Boot CD with Service Pack 3 and I can install and remove Boot Camp and reinstall. Now since I have clearly stated that I don't want to loose my current data, it has been said that this is the fix.

Here was the email from Thursday

"We managed to find the solution. Please follow steps 1-8 from this KB article:

http://kb.parallels.com/en/5447


After being on the phone yesterday with multiple attempts to go to L1 Support and 5 hours of disconnected calls to Level 1 technical support, I finally got to an engineer who told me to call Apple and they would repair Boot Camp and all would be good. Our Technical Support debated with the Parallels Engineer about repair and that it could not be accomplished without destroying of the data and we were assured that that was not the case. In any case, I called Apple Support and they said the only way to repair Boot Camp is to remove and reinstall and all data would be lost.

The challenge is how or if can I revert to Parallels Version 3 or somehow fix the Boot Camp so it will start? I have a lot of data that I don't want to loose and this is my last hope that there is someone who actually can help and give me the straight story.

If any know how this can actually be resolved without loosing all my data, please contact me and we can discuss a payment for your efforts. I am not a techie, but this is a lousy upgrade with terrible installation and documentation.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Tom

 

You do not have to lose your data. If data is on a hard drive it and the drive works, it can always be recovered. Is your bootcamp partition NTFS or FAT32?

 

From what I read and from my personal experience you have three options

1 - downgrade to Parallels Desktop 3. You will first need to uninstall PD4. Open downloaded PD4 dmg, find Uninstall application there and perform the uninstall. Then download and install PD3: http://download.parallels.com/v3/en/GA/Parallels-Desktop-5608-Mac-en.dmg. After install try booting your Boot Camp as PD3 VM, it worked for some of us.

2 - Do repair install as written in KB. Repair install does not delete data, just recovers some critical Windows files. But it's rather complicated way.

3 - Do nothing and wait for Parallels to come up with solution. They are working on it.

Option 1 worked for me. After that I backed all my documents at Windows and tried option 2, it also worked. Now I'm on v4 with working Boot Camp. Whew.

 

Some good news...

Some good news! I was able to reinstall Parallels 3 and get the VM open in running with the exception of my Outlook connection with our VPN and I am sure that can be resolved with our Network admin. Monday. I did try to Boot to the Windows via Boot Camp and that has the error with I had with the VM when upgrading to Parallels 4. It would seem that the Windows Boot Camp is corrupted and now need to figure out how to untangle that little mess if possible.

Do you know if there is a method to convert what seems to be intact in the Parallels 3 Desktop?