folder required for the correct operation of Parallels Desktop is not available

Good morning experts;
I have an iMac bound to the office network through LDAP. The users are a mix of mobile and network accounts. I have Parallels 4.0.3848 installed and a Windows XP virtual machine. It is not bound to anything and only has one 'user' account for everybody to share. The Windows XP.pvm is located in a Users/Shared/Parallels folder. And for most users this works fine. Some users get the message: The folder required for the correct operation of Parallels Desktop is not available. Reinstall the Application.
I did reinstall the application and it solved the problem for one user, not for others, and started to affect users that worked fine before. I uninstalled Parallels and reinstalled again, but the newly affected users are still not able to use the virtual machine and the get the above stated message.

If I could even get a hint as to which folder this error message is talking about I would be happy. Obviously the complete solution would be my favorite.

Thanks for your help.

 

Hi,

Please send a problem report from menu of Parallels Desktop "Help" -> "Report a Problem" and post here its id

 

The problem id is 1090598

 

problem ID

The problem ID is 1090598. I had replied that this afternoon, but it was still not posted tonight. So here it is again.

 

The problem ID is 1090598. Let's see if this 'quick reply' works better than the 'Post Reply'. I've done that twice already and I haven't seen it appear yet.

 

I don't know what it means, but there are next messages in the log:

Parallels VM Directory /Network/Servers/server.andersonair.ca/Volumes/Data/Users/shanef/Documents/Parallels does not exists

No such file or directory, /Network/Servers/server.andersonair.ca/Volumes/Data/Users

CreateDirectoryPath() return error for path='/Network/Servers/server.andersonair.ca/Volumes/Data/Users

Does it give any hint? Is the path to user's home directory correct?

I'm not familiar with this part of Parallels Desktop, but will forward the issue to the proper person if the path is not correct

 

Hi,

looks from the above as if Parallels were trying to look for its virtual machine files (the virtual hard disk and configuration files) in this directory: /Users/shanef/Documents/Parallels, not in Users/Shared/Parallels. Maybe you could drop an alias to Users/Shared/Parallels into the /Users/shanef/Documents/ folder? I would hope that user shanef could then access parallels.

Alternatively, you might tell Parallels where to look for its data: Set "Users/Shared/Parallels" as the standard directory in the Parallels settings (not the VM settings).

 

That helps a lot!

Gents, thank you. I know exactly what it means and how to fix it now. Thank you very much.

The place where it points is a folder on the server system where the mobile account is hosted and because the parallels installations are slight different on the users own computer versus the machine on which he is logged in when this problem occurs, the 'sync' of the mobile account goes awry.

thank you very much for your help!

 

Back for another question. Any idea where the data file is that holds the address for the user folder in parallels? Is it a plist somewhere? Rather than having the Parallels try to point to some network folder, I would rather it pointed to a local folder, that will get synchronized on shutdown. The problem is that I can not access the Parallels GUI to tell Parallels which folder to use without starting Parallels. And I can't do that because it is pointing in the wrong place.

Thanks