BSOD in both Parallels (4) AND Boot Camp

BSOD in both Parallels (4) AND Boot Camp -- FIXED!!!

So I made the foolish mistake of actually upgrading to Parallels 4.0 (from 3.0). After the upgrade, starting the VM resulted in a boot disk not found error. Tried a reinstall of 4.0, same problem. After spending a couple of hours on the phone with tech support, we finally got it working after reinstalling Parallels Tools a couple of times.

Seemed to be working fine for a couple of days -- slow, of course. Shut down and restarted and now it appears that something in the Boot Camp partition has been corrupted. I get a BSOD when booting into Boot Camp. At first I got the same screen when booting via Parallels. Then suddenly, Parallels starting giving me the old Can't Find the Boot disk error again. Other info -- MacBook Pro 15", 2.66G, 4G Ram, 10.5.5, XP Pro SP3.

Can't even boot in Safe Mode in Boot Camp. I get a BAD_SYSTEM_CONFIG_INFO error with STOP 0x00000074.

Any ideas on how to recover from this mess, before I just save off my data files, rebuild the Boot Camp partition, and give up on 4.0? (I should have left well enough alone and just stayed with Parallels 3.0. Live and learn!).

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FIXED 2 days later.

Since the only thing I did to my system besides work on a Word doc was upgrade to P4, I have to believe it was the cause of the problem. The 0x74 stop can be caused by hardware problems -- especially memory. But after running memtest all night with no errors, that was clearly NOT the problem. So - next bet -- System Hive.

Thanks to a nice piece of software that actually allows the Mac to WRITE to an NTFS partition (http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/) I was able to resurrect the system hive without resorting to using the Repair Console on the Windows install CD. Why was this important? I'm traveling on business, that's why. And I lost the ability to run Windows at a REALLY bad time.

So, I was able to follow the instructions in this MS KB article -- http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545/en-us -- making appropriate adjustments based on the fact that I could use OS X to fix the problems with the hive. The nice thing, too, about accessing Windows directories via OS X is that all of the "hidden" and "super-hidden" file nonsense doesn't exist. You can see and get to anything and everything without mucking around with Windows permissions.

It appears that everything is back to where it once was -- ok, it's a couple of weeks old based on the Recovery Point I restored to.

But for now, I have completely abandoned the notion of using P4. I may -- maybe -- reinstall P3. Boot Camp works just fine -- and since I separate work and not-work, maybe that's a better approach overall.

P4 is absolutely not ready for prime time. I hope the Parallels guys get this beta -- no -- alpha -- software fixed soon. P3 was great. P4, not even close to so much. And after reading the VMWare boards, it doesn't appear that 2.0.1 there is doing so well either. Rush to market, you get what you get --- crap!