Hazardous Shared Folders Bug in RC1/2

Hi all!

I'm experiencing a very severe bug with Shared Folders in both RC1 and RC2 which frequently destroys or damages the contents of open files.

First, a brief glimpse at the setup on my MacBook Pro: One Shared Folder is specified in Parallels which points to a whole Volume in MAC OS (not the system volume). This Shared Folder is accessible in XP as \\.psf\somename . To make things easier while working with XP, I created an autostart batch file that does a subst-command mapping this Shared Folder to drive letter D:.

So far, so well. I can access the Shared Folder by drive letter D: and work with the shared contents of the OSX volume just as I would with a normal partition in XP. However, working with certain applications and having files open does render these files unusable quite frequently. Two examples:

1. Having files open in Borland Developer Studio 2006 sometimes (mostly after compilation) leads to corrupted files although they were opened only with read access and never saved in BDS. The contents of the files become overwritten with what looks like hex codes. Closing the files without saving does not help because the original file on the hard disk has already become altered.

2. Editing files in UltraEdit sometimes has parts of the file appear after the former file ending. Deleting the magically created new lines (unholy magic, that is) and saving the file does not help. Closing the file and re-opening it brings back the irregular lines.

Since these two errors occur quite often, my deep love for Parallels is slightly leaking. Do you experience similar errors? Can something be done about it?

Kind regards,
Malte

 

Another thing that happened (with RC1) was that file creation dates were set to some date in 1970.

Can anybody confirm any of these bugs concerning Shared Folders?

 

Yes, this all seems to happen to me as well - both from Windows XP and Windows 2000...
My creation dates get set to December 1969 or something.

I was using InstallShield Pro to build an installation with several files from a shared folder and it seemed to corrupt a few of them. It then reported their size as 0 bytes.

 

It just happened again. I opened a file on a Shared Folder in
Borland Developer Studio 2006 which should look like:

Code:

unit Drawer_Classes;

interface

uses
  classes, base_classes, defs, dialogs;

type
  
  TRenderingEngineSpecs = class
...

but what I got was

Code:

AABA00F0AABA00F0 ABBA00F0AABA00F0 AABA00F0E6BA00F0 AABA00F0AABA00F0
85D900F0B4CF00F0 D6BA00F0D6BA00F0 D6BA00F0D6BA00F0 0AC300F0D6BA00F0
5B0000C0F4BA00F0 FEBA00F061C400F0 41CC00F008BB00F0 16D100F04DD700F0
40BE00F04DBE00F0 F9D700F0AABA00F0 AABA00F089B800F0 65C100F0921000C0
0000000000000000 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 0000000000000000
AABA00F0AABA00F0 AABA00F0AABA00F0 AABA00F0AABA00F0 AABA00F0AABA00F0
D0D900F0DDBA00F0 DDBA00F0DDBA00F0 25DC00F025BF00F0 27CA00F0DDBA00F0
0000000000000000 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 0000000000000000
...

Different from what Rich observed with InstallShield, in BDS 2006
the file size remains exactly the same for the corrrupted file compared
to the original one. Only its contents are scrambled. BTW, such a corrupted
file cannot be removed/renamed until after a restart of the VM.

That's a really severe bug that renders Shared Folders unusable for me,
especially since it happens on a frequent basis. I'd like to see a comment
from Parallels on that.

Bye, Malte.

 

Thank you very much for reporting - we will investigate this situation.

 

Thanks a lot, Andrew. I love Parallels and would never have bought my MacBook if Parallels wasn't available. It really is the superior alternative to Bootcamp and provides the OS flexibility I need for my daily work.

However, I am completely reliant on sharing folders from MAC OS to XP and thus would be very happy if a solution to the file corruption problem was available.

I tried not using subst but mapping the Shared Folder as a network drive in XP, unfortunately with no improvement. Files still become corrupt on a regular basis.

Kind regards,
Malte

 

Hello All!

1. If you have any problems with SF - please update Parallels Tools using full uninstallation and subsequent installation. There is bug in update which keeps old SF files during tools update in RC2.

2. We have some SF bugs fixed after RC2. If someone want to check SF issues in our internal build - please PM me.

 

Can confirm both bugs reported by Sirblackadder, only that my files were shredded while using Borland Delphi 2005.

One remark to Sirblackadders 1st posting: I am not sure whether it's correct that read-access to files in Shared Folders can corrupt these files. From what I observed only files become corrupt that had been saved shortly before. The Borland IDE appears to silently reload saved files whilst compiling. It does not issue the usual warning "file XYZ has been modified outside of Borland Delphi" because the corrupt file has the exact same file date as when it was saved.

My guess is that files get damaged while saving them but you notice this only some time later when Borland's IDE reloads those files during the compilation process.

Best wishes, Shaun.

 

Sirblackadder---you may want to consider using SMB shares instead of PSFs until this is resolved. I frankly don't see any performance differences, and it seems more stable.

 

Shaun, you're right. Memorizing all incidents when file corruption occured I am pretty sure that I had edited and saved every of the files in question shortly before. I just did not make the connection between saving and the time the corruption became visible because there was no file I/O error issued by BDS 2006 upon saving.

Sorry for my misleading post.


BTW, the error cannot stem from upgrading from RC1 to RC2 because I had those issues when working with RC1, too.

 

Using Samba is a good idea, I had already thought about. My problem is that I do not fully understand the networking concept in Parallels Workstation.

I use the Win XP VM in bridged ethernet mode. Does the VM have its own IP then? And can I access the MAC OS by its public IP? Or do I have to use the Network Places in XP to search for the shared Samba folders on my Mac?


Alright, studied the docs. Switched to host-only-networking, assigned static IPs in both host and guest OS, edited smb.conf and can now connect from Win XP to Mac OSX. Great!


Kind regards,
Malte

 

Freespace?

Apart from the horrendous bug, does your installation report free space on the shared correctly?

 

Mine reports like 76KB free (give or take a couple KB. I can't remember exactly). This causes plenty of problems

 

Problem with free space is alredy fixed after RC2.

 

If we uninstall and reinstall what happens to our VM?

 

Try using this method for sharing files

go to this site
http://wiki.onmac.net/index.php/Parallels_Sharing_Files

and use the Share Points application on the Mac to set it up. Works like a charm.

Hope this helps.

 

@mtooker

I guess Andrew referred to uninstalling an reinstalling only the Parallels Tools in the Guest OS, not the whole Parallels Workstation software.

However, as it seems, the Shared Folder feature needs not be used with Parallels since there are at least two other ways of connecting Mac volumes to the XP guest OS: a) using Samba and b) with Share Points application. I preferred the Samba way because it is already built into OSX and - as mcg suggested - it works perfectly.

So long, Shaun

 

I did a full un-install of Parallel Tools, reboot windows, then re-install. All issues related to Shared Folders and Quicken are now resolved and it works great with RC2.

Alan

 

I've had problems with Shared Folders and MS applications for quite a while. It is not clear to me what progress Parallels has made. On the positive side, I did as Andrew suggested and uninstalled and reinstalled the tools. Now I can open my Outlook database and save an Excel file. So, that is good. Based on comments here though, it sounds to me that there are still some major problems.

Regarding Samba shares, I've noticed that RC2 has some stability issues. It seems to me since RC2, I've had several instances where I mysteriously loose the Samba connection. The failure is severe because it causes an apparant instability in Samba requiring a reboot of the Mac so that the VM can see the Samba share again.

 

This is still happening to me on the GA release. I have had it happen 2 times now that my "Documents" folder, which is shared with 2 different VM's gets the file date reset on every file. Every file in the folder gets its last modified date reset to sometime in 1969. I only notice it because I use Synchronize X Plus to backup this folder as well and it reports to me that it is going to overwrite every file in the folder.