Stuck at BIOS, can't install or boot from any device

Hi there,

I'm trying Parallels for the first time, and I'm not getting very far The BIOS simply refuses to recognize the Windows 7 disk which is in the physical drive.

When I create a new image, Parallels detects the Windows 7 disk in the drive and starts the VM creation assistant just fine. But when it boots this fresh new image it doesn't detect any bootable devices, and therefore fails to proceed.

I thought it might be an issue with the DVD drive, so I instead tried to boot from a .cdr image of the disk instead, and that didn't work either. Same issue, the BIOS just walks the boot device list and fails to boot from any of them.

If it helps, when the BIOS attempts to boot from the DVD I hear the drive spin up and the desktop DVD icon for it disappears (and won't reappear until I stop the VM). However after a few seconds of spinning it eventually says "...failed" and moves on to the other boot devices before giving up completely. If I retry the boot sequence without restarting the VM I get the same problem but without the disk spinning, and it reaches the failure point much faster.

I have ensured that the DVD drive is correctly configured to be connected and is on the right IDE channel (0:1). I tried other channels but had the same issue. This is a day-old Mac with literally nothing else installed on it other than what OSX provides by default. Parallels version is 5.0.9376.

Any ideas? I'd really appreciate any help!

Thanks,
Brian

 

Figured it out - this was caused by a faulty disk. I tried to use it for a native installation via BootCamp and got an identical error. So I tried another disk and instantly got to the installation. Phew!