3 to 4 upgrade (vista) stalled... fixed it, sharing my method

Hey all,
Decided to share my upgrade solution, since I didn't find any helpful prior posts here on the forums.

So last week, I installed Snow Leopard... was running Vista through Parallels 3 and didn't realize 3 wasn't compatible with 10.6 until I had already migrated to the new OS.

The forced unsuspension of the guest OS has already been covered so I won't touch on that... however, once I started the process of updating my guest OS to Parallels 4, it hung on step 2 of 4 for several hours.

As mentioned in other forum posts, I hit ctrl-opt-cmd-r to gracefully exit the update process & continue it manually. After launching Parallels & starting the virtual machine, I was then quickly greeted by a windows Vista screen, asking me for Windows Activation. I selected the "do so online", but received an error telling me that Vista was unable to connect, and hitting cancel would cause Vista to simply shut down. I was at an impasse. Then the stars aligned, I had an epiphany, and the following solution arose:

1.) Shut down your Vista VM
2.) Grab the Parallels Network Adapter files found here: http://kb.parallels.com/en/5808 and decompress.
3.) Use the Parallels Explorer app to mount your VM's hard drive & place the entire (newly downloaded/decompressed) pd40_net folder in the desktop folder of your VM.
4.) Shut down Parallels Explorer & start up your Vista VM again.
5.) Once you get back to the screen asking for Windows Activation, move that window aside and you should see a "new hardware found: ethernet adapter" window. (if it's not there, click "activate online" in the activation window... this should cause the "new hardware found" window to appear)
6.) Select "install from a different location", browse to your desktop & select the pd40_net folder from your desktop.
7.) wait as windows happily installs the driver.
8.) Once the driver has finished installing, go back to the "windows activation" window & select "activate online"
9.) There might be a few hoops to jump through after this point, but do so & you'll eventually get to the point where Windows will actually startup.
10.) You may get more "new hardware found" dialogue windows, just move them aside.
11.) From your Parallels menu, select "install parallels tools"
12.) Tools should start installing... and if you give it a little bit longer....
13.) The initial upgrade process (that had been stuck at 2 of 4) now starts up again... this time at 3 of 4.
14.) TADA! (...and you're back off to the races)


Hope this helps someone out.

brian.

 

Thanks -- using FDD image also works

Thank you for the above instructions. I ran into the same issue, but had Windows Vista installed on my boot camp partition, which I was unable to mount with write access to copy the network drivers to the Windows desktop.

Instead, I downloaded the .FDD floppy disk image containing the network drivers and told Vista to look for the network drivers at A:\

After installing the network drivers Vista re-activated fine, and I am now noticing the improved performance of Parallels running on my white MacBook. I evaluated VMware Fusion yesterday, but I think Parallels 4 fixed most of the issues I had with Parallels 3 (notably, the terrible UI and buttons). So it looks like Parallels sold another upgrade and I will be able to move up to Snow Leopard now.