Hi, I have the following problem. I installed a Parallels on my MacBook, with WIndows XP. The Windows XP is installed with BootCamp, so Parallels takes the WinXp installation from BootCamp. It never worked well, I want to disinstall it. But I cannot switch the winxp off: when I open the windows in the parallels it is so slow that it takes hours to do anything, and I am not even able to select the switch off button in the windows system. So I have to kill the parallel process. When I do that, I cannot restart the windows from BootCamp: when I select windows from BootCamp, a black screen appears, asking me if I want to choose "Paralles" or "Windows Xp". Consider that in this moment I am not in the MacOs, I am at the beginning of everythin with a black screen, so the Parallels installation doesn't make sense at this stage. The default is "Parallels" (and it takes very short time to start, something like one second). If "Parallels" is started, Windows does not start, it complains about a file missing in the system32 folder. If I am very fast, I can select to start "Windows" and it works, it starts, and I am happy with this. But I would like to avoid the blanck screen at the beginning, I want to start Windows directly. I suppose that the black screen will disappear if I manage to switch off WIndows from Parallels, but I don't know how to do that, it is completely stalled. So please, give me some suggestion on how to solve this problem. Thanks.
Why PM? !@#? Surely the idea of forums is for all to see the answers, the idea being that if there is a reply to one question here it may address the problem of several users. @Xenos is there any reasoning for PM'ing the answer in this particular case?
They may be giving links to an internal beta build, in which case they don't want the public getting the link.
Dear hairyneanderthal, I've posted the reply on PM because this issue is not really VM problem. This is Parallels Support Forum, not Microsoft Support. Do you have difficulties, similar to those whymax had? Best regards, Xenos
Do you have difficulties, similar to those whymax had? Well... basically, I take an interest in problems where the configuration or problems seems similar to my own. In this case the the problems described by this user on their OSX and the Parallels side - at least up to the point where both Windows and OSX both became unresponsive, needing a reset of the Mac itself are something I have seen myself. I understand VM technology quite well (due to my job) so I have been able to work out the problem myself in that I had allocated too much Ram for XP considering I only had 1G of Ram on my MacBook. As you see this would not have been a MS problem in my case. Essentially, I don't understand the need to answer support questions by private mail. I have used forums myself for many years, but have rarely posted. Why? Because almost invariably the questions have been asked before. If your support is answering by PM you end up having to answer the same question again and again.
whymax, When you were using Parallels with your Boot Camp Installation, it added an additional entry to your boot.ini file. If you remove this entry, it will resolve your trouble. Here are instructions on how to edit your boot.ini file. If you go into your System Properties in the Control Panel, on the Advanced Tab, you will see a Settings button under Startup and Recovery. This is where you can change the default entry, and the time to display the list of operating systems. If you click on Edit, it will open your boot.ini file for direct editing. Hope this helps!
I'm having the same problem. Out of nowhere today, my Parallels configuration has become corrupt. I get the "missing or corrupt system file: ntoskern.exe" and cannot get into my Boot Camp VM in Parallels. Yet when I boot into Boot Camp, I see the boot.ini option for both and when I go right into Windows XP Professional it works fine. So this seems to be a problem with the "Parallels Configuration" entry in the boot.ini I'm writing this from inside Boot Camp/XP and it's 100% fully functional, I just cannot get it to boot in Parallels directly. Thanks!
ekimneems - xp My first advice is to back up everything you care about before messing around with the parallels VM. If bootcamp direct works fine and everything is dandy, you can delete the parallels hardware profile in windows using bulletproofs link above. Then you can boot into mac and delete the parallels VM. As a precaution i would then boot back into bootcamp and make sure all is still well. Finally, you could log back into mac os parallels and install a fresh bootcamp vm. I can't think why that shouldn't work assuming that no residual files are left around by parallels and the .pvs has been deleted, in which case parallels should see this as just another fresh vm install. I've had some horrible issues where my hal.dll and ntoskrnl were disrupted and in the end i had to reinstall those files and finally got bootcamp to fire up xp (I may have been able to just edit the boot.ini file as well if i could have got access to it but that was an XP recovery console issue). I think that if the bootcamp vm os hangs or parallels itself hangs for any reason, your vm and by extension bootcamp partition can be left in an unpredictable and volatile state for recovery. This is probably a challenge for parallels because of the way that they implement the bootcamp vm. I will stand humbly corrected by parallels and those more knowledgeable than myself and their are plenty of bright people on this forum that may offer their advice as well.
