Although I had a parallels partition and parallels running fine, I recently had to also install Boot camp on my Mac. After installing Boot camp on a different partition, I now can't get Parallels to access my other version of windows: it gives the error message at the end of this post. Is there anything I can do to fix this? If I reinstall Parallels (which I think will probably have unwanted side effects) will it perfectly map onto the current Parallels partition I have, allowing me to use all the programs as before? Will it mess up Boot camp's version of Windows or Boot camp's use of drivers? Error message: "Parallels Desktop is unable to operate properly since it cannot communicate with one of its drivers. Try to restart the application to overcome this issue. If restart doesn't help, re-install Parallels Desktop. Note that Parallels drivers require a short time to be properly started and initialized. So you may need to wait a minute before trying to launch the application." Thank you, Joseph Williams
when you are referring to "Parallels partition" do you mean a usual Parallels virtual machine? Currently, I would assume so since virtual machines could be of two types only - usual virtual machines that use .hdd or .pvm files to store all the data and virtual machines based on a boot camp partition. Also, it is not very clear which version of Parallels is that. As for now, in any case, reinstalling Parallels application itself should not do any harm. Usual virtual machines would not be affected at all and for a boot camp you can always even delete and create new virtual machines without affecting the partition.
Hi, you are right it uses an .hdd file. So, from what you are saying, there is no chance that I lose my current information in Windows even if I uninstall and reinstall Parallels? I'm just reluctant to do that because Windows was installed through Parallels, so I'm not sure if that might get deleted when I uninstall Parallels. The reason I installed Boot camp was because I was missing a driver I needed in the Windows program in Parallels. Installing Boot camp seemed to somehow have messed up Parallels driver, although I don't see how that was possible. Is it possible that reinstalling would mess up boot camp's drivers? Boot camp is doing what I need now so if that happens it would be disastrous. Thank you for your response, Joseph
Reinstallation of Parallels does not affect the virtual machine environment, same, basically, goes for the boot camp partition. Reinstalling Parallels Tools does. And in both cases if you are concerned about Boot Camp stability (not through Parallels but loading natively) then reinstall of Parallels Desktop application would not affect Boot camp performance.
