I have bought my iMac back in September, a 20 inch. I have been pleased with it so far but I am having troubles installing Windows XP Home Edition. The reason I wanted to is because I have games for my old PC and I do not want to buy new versions of those games for Mac, which may have been cheaper. I bought the full version of Windows XP Home Edition Service Pack 2 from Fry's Electronics. Next, I Installed Parallels Desktop on my Mac. I go into it and try to install windows XP but it made me restart the computer, while the disk was in the drive. I tried looking at the help contents and it did not help. I also looked at the FAQ and that did not help either. I also searched Yahoo on this subject but all tutorials are done using Windows XP Professional Edition and I still had to restart my computer (nothing happened each time), even after following the tutorials. The booklet I got was exactly like the tutorial. Is there anyway, I can get Parallels to recognize the disc and install Home edition (because no tutorial mentioned needing to restart the whole computer) or should I go back and get Pro Edition?
Note that when the XP installer tells you to restart the computer, that refers to the virtual machine, not the host computer. When the install gets to that point, use the red button on the Parallels window to restart the VM, leaving the disk in the drive.
Another part That would make sense but I cannot select anything, not even the apple icon to restart the computer. The screen darkens, like it is going into sleep mode, for the display. and it tells me to restart the whole computer, not the virtual machine. I have had more than five attempts at it so far. This means I can only shutdown and restart the computer from the main power button. There is a message when this happens saying I need to restart the whole computer and when it comes back up there is an error message, this happened every time, I am looking for a solution to this problem.
On, that sounds like a kernel panic in the Mac OS. Sorry, I can't help there. You'll need to post specific error messages, and/or the panic log.
error message it says something about something being quit due to the restart of the computer. Like an application unexpectedly closed message.
If you have a new iMac with Core 2 Duo, you need the latest version of Parallels, not the version that's in the box. Download it from here.
