Hello dear community members, I just jumped into this forum because I'm desperately seeking any hint/help I can get. First things first: I don't own Parallels but I have a Mac Mini (Intel, Late 2014) from a client standing next to me that's running macOS 10.12.6 (Sierra) - yes I know this is ancient - plus Parallels Desktop 12 for using a specialized business software all-in-one solution. Worked so far for him, so why change a running system? Long story short: the VM seems to have crashed leaving a broken system SSD (not bootable anymore - maybe due to hardware defects) and by now I haven't found a solution to restore files from the VM file. AND: Of course - worst case scenario - unfortunately no backup. But that's a different story... What I already did: - connected the broken SSD external to my own Mac (M1, Sonoma). The disk didn't show up, but using Disk Utility or Terminal command diskutil I could figure out its presence -> little hope came up. - tried using two different restoring solutions (Stellar Data Recovery & Disk Warrior) to find at least a .pvm file -> not successful. - using Apple's Terminal and the dd command made my mood a bit brighter because I could raw copy content to another external drive that had a valid-looking directory structure. In the end the .pvm looked good, but the content seemed to be broken. - using the tool QEMU I found out that a regular .pvm has the format parallels and the restored one only showed raw. Even using qemu-img convert from raw to hdd/hds or even VMware's vmdk format didn't work out. Also qemu-img dd wasn't successful at the end. - I also followed various tips/advice to create a blank VM in Parallels with no source and copy the restored .hds as a renamed .hdd to the .pvm, then selecting the new .hdd file, starting the VM and then coming up to the question if I want to convert the file but ended up in an EFI boot screen and that was it. Don't know if I forgot something I tried to get the files but this is very frustrating... I'd appreciate any further help or tools to hopefully at least copy contents from the image or best case get this VM up and running again... Thanks in advance Ralf
