Windows 11 no longer booting past start screen on MacBook Air

Discussion in 'Parallels Desktop on a Mac with Apple silicon' started by MikeB30, Dec 20, 2021.

  1. MikeB30

    MikeB30 Bit poster

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    I have a new MacBook Air (M1, 2020) running MacOs 12.1 and have installed Parallels 17.1.1. This installed Windows 11. This was working fine yesterday. Today, Windows 11 stops with a black screen with the blue squares of the Windows logo. Screenshot attached. If I click on this my cursor disappears and I see a message in the top bar saying "Ctrl Alt" to free cursor. That gets it back, but I can't progress past this screen with urgent work to do. I note the CPU usage is shown in the top bar as 100%. What is happening and how can I get this working again?
    I've set the mouse/trackpad as "Don't optimise for games", as I've seen that suggested, but that makes no difference to either progressing past this screen or whether the cursor disappears.
     

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  2. MikeB30

    MikeB30 Bit poster

    Messages:
    4
    Got it working! At least for now.
    I noticed that reference to CD/DVD appears in a couple of places in the configurations, but my MacBook Air has no CD/DVD drive (I guess none do). So I removed the CD/DVD from the boot order and selected "disconnect" under the CD/DVD hardware settings. Then Windows started immediately on request.
    Was that it? I'll report back if it stops working.
     
  3. SamS4

    SamS4 Hunter

    Messages:
    123
    I had the same problem. I think it might've been related to closing the Control Center window during the boot process. I think it froze the boot of the VM. I now leave the Parallels Control Center open until windows 11 is successfully up and then I close it.
     

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