After some initial install problems with XP, I was so jazzed to get it up and running. I needed more space on the virtual hard drive and followed the instructions in the user guide (page 168) to increase the size of the hard disk image. All went as shown in the guide. Once I went to start the virtual machine got the message: "A disk read error occurred Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart" Attempted to comply but nothing happened. Didn't know how to make a backup so is there anything I can try? Rich O
Not sure about your main issue, but so far as backup goes, that's easy. In ~/Library/Parallels (or wherever you've told Parallels to store your VM), you'll see a directory for each VM you've created. Inside that directory are two files, a .pvs file and a .hdd file. The .pvs file is just the Parallels settings for the VM. The .hdd file is the virtual hard disk. You can either backup just the .hdd file, or both, simply by copying them. I keep one backup of the .pvs file (which I update only when I change settings, which is fairly rare), and a few different .hdd backups representing system states I might want to revert to. If your .hdd file is under/around 4GB, you can even burn a copy off to a DVD. (I did this with a post-installation/activation, pre-configuration Windows XP install to save time in the future)
