Holy crap!!! How did that happen??
When I set up this new macpro with its two, 500GB drives, I partitioned the second drive with two, 10GB volumes, VISITOR1 and VISITOR2, just for containing files (.hdd, .pvs, other) related to virtual machines. And -- wow -- those two volumes are MSDOS FAT32s! ... Not something I'd have done intentionally, must be a Disk Utility default I didn't notice...
I do note that when I took a poof-ing .hdd to a DVD, and from the DVD onto a Macbook hard disk (which I just checked and is definitely OS X Extended) the .hdd still failed (poofed) in that new environment.
I'll try removing devices from the Parallels setup screen -- I can no longer get to the Windows Device Manager (if that's what you mean) because the VM poofs too early.
Disabled all devices except Memory and Hard Disk in each of two failing VMs. They still poofed during bootup, just like before.
Reformat VISITOR1 and VISITOR2 as OS X Extended volumes. Rebuild WinXP VM: installed, ran software update (63 updates!) installed F-Secure trial. All lovely but that's normal. The real test comes tomorrow!
Last edited: Oct 23, 2006