Parallels won't boot up anymore

There's usually an icon on my desktop with the little parallels picture that says "Microsoft Windows XP" and that's still there, but another icon appeared (I don't know what I did to make it appear) with the same picture that says "My Boot Camp." When I click the Windows one, it says "File /Users/Documents/Parallels/Microsoft Windows XP/Microsoft Windows XP.pvs seems to be not a valid Parallels virtual machine configuration file!" And when I click the My Boot Camp one it says "Virtual machine cannot be started because of the following problem:

The Hard Disk 1 is set to use the Boot Camp while Boot Camp is not installed on this computer!"

Any ideas??

 

Dear kelsey.e,

Try creating a new virtual machine but use the existing hard drive and see if that will boot it.

When you create a new VM and the wizard pops up, select custom, not typical or express, select your OS, RAM size, and then when it asks you about a hard drive, select Use an existing hard disk image and point it to your XP virtual HD. Then see if that boots.

The second error message indicates that you do not have Boot Camp installed but if you open configuration page of that machine you will see that one HardDisk 1 - Boot Camp file.

 

I have the same problem, and if I follow your advice, the machine asks for the windows installation cd. is that ok if i plug it in or will it actually delete all files on the virtual disk?

thanks a lot!!!