XP Pro SP2 under Boot Camp itself runs OK, and used to run OK in a Virtual Machine based on it, but now that VM hangs at the black screen (BIOS?) stage, the last notification being "Trying to boot from Primary Master IDE drive ..." To fix the Boot Camp VM issue, could I simply delete the VM and create a new one from the Boot Camp partition? Also makes me wonder academically if I could have more than one VM defined onto the same Boot Camp partition - is that possible? I ask here first rather than experiment because I don't want to mess up the boot partition. Obviously not a good idea to have both Boot Camp VMs open at once (is that possible?). The cause of the problem is unknown but there are a few suspects. I upgraded Mac OS X to the max, including OS 10.5.6, and installed and updated Final Cut Studio, hence "Pro Applications". I feel suspicious about OS X 10.5.6 because its new security policy caused problems with one of my other applications (fixed by chown/chmod commands etc.), and I am reading about similar problems with other Mac applications stumbling under 10.5.6, so wouldn't be surprised if Parallels did. I tried searching on "10.5.6" in the forum (thread contents) but that search doesn't even return postings I know already to contain that string (maybe the forum search doesn't like numbers?). The other change I made (also under suspicion), using iPartition, was to change the size (and hence physical location of data in) all partitions, including the boot partition. Could that be the cause? I don't expect that because as stated the Boot Camp itself (not in Parallels) boots with no obvious problems. Likewise Mac OS X. On first boot of Boot Camp after the repartitioning, XP reported file system inconsistencies, which it fixed automatically by deleting some indexes and creating some others. Also it unexpectedly reported "New Hardware". Since then booting XP/Boot Camp has been just straightforward, so I guess it was simply adjusting to the partition change as a one-off exercise. Any help or insights ?
Hello, Espy, to my mind, the suspicion 2 (iPartition) seems to be the cause. Parallels Desktop keeps the old configuration of your machine and can not boot it after the changes made. Yes, you can delete this machine and recreate it if you are able to login to Boot Cam partition directly now. It is strongly not recommended to try to start 2 Boot Camp-based machines simultaneously. It can cause unexpected behaviour and data loss. Though, I see no reason to have 2 Boot Camp-based machines if you can run 1 only.
