Having received notification of the new beta just as I was about to install 2 new programs in a Windows XP VM, I installed the beta first (including clearing and reinstalling new Parallels tools). Now neither of the 2 programs will install. The DVDs just keep spinning and spinning and nothing happens. One gets as far as displaying the initial choice window from the setup file, but clicking on the install option (or any option) has no effect. The other doesn't even get that far. The DVD titles and contents display correctly in Explorer, but the files simply will not run, and attempting to halt the process returns the message that there is no disc in the drive. The only way to get out of the continual spinning is to release the CD/DVD drive back to OS X and eject the discs. Rebooted VM. No difference. Rebooted OS X. No difference. Reinstalled Parallels beta. No difference. Thinking Windows might be corrupted, I reverted to an older saved VM which I knew to be working fine, installing new Parallels tools again. No difference. Checked other CDs from within Windows and read and imported data files with no problem. Tried running a commercial video DVD in the VM but Windows Media Player said it couldn't play it because a compatible DVD decoder is not installed. (Whether that's a valid error message or not I have no idea since I've never used Media Player to watch DVDs.) Checked "hard disc" space and Explorer returns 2.36GB free (of 8GB allocated) though the size of the total VM in OS X is 7.32GB. Since it's rather beyond the bounds of coincidence that I should have 2 duff discs from 2 separate companies, both of whom I've had no problems with before, I'm wondering if this is a problem with DVDs as opposed to CDs. I've installed software from DVD in this Windows VM in previous versions of Parallels with no difficulty. Ideas anyone?
Would these program install in Parallels before the new beta? Windows Medai player won't play DVDs by itself. It requires you to install a DVD playback codec (which they charged moeny for last time I checked) before it will. Can you copy the files off the DVD onto the (virtual) hard disk? It would be helpful if you were to say what programs they are ...
It probably wouldn't because they're specialist software which I'm 99.99% certain none of you will have heard of and, being a beta tester for both, I know nobody else is running them in a Windows VM on a Mac. An earlier version of one of the programs installed fine on the VM. In fact, better than fine -- it flew through the installation in barely 10 minutes whereas on my 2 year-old PC the same installation took around 50 minutes (neither program is particularly complex but both ride on big databases). The other I haven't tried, but have been using earlier versions of both in Windows for some years with few problems. Been working some more on it this today and the problem seems to centre around available drive space. However, there's some odd stuff going on with inconsistencies being thrown up between apparent available space and specified drive size. I'm trying various configurations (expanded vs plain) of an increased virtual hard drive using Image Tool, but since this takes an age to process each time, I won't be able to report fully on it until later.
Perhaps a silly question, but does your drive still work normally in MacOS? It is possibly (if unlikely) that your drive just coincidentally failed. I have seen a few situations where DVD drives will work fine with CD but not with DVD - the tracks are MUCH narrower and a slight misalignment might cause some problems.
For the most part it does. Occasionally, attempting to watch a commercially-recorded DVD results in a response like a snail on a trampoline in DVD Player, but reading other data/software has never been a problem. For the moment I'm favouring the lack-of-drive-space rational since after a lot of faffing about I managed to get one of the programs to part-install today until it ran out of space. I also upped the available VM RAM. Having experimented all day with increasing the size of the virtual hdd via Image Tool and attempting to install this software without success, I then ran Parallels Compressor, which finally confirmed to me what might be happening here. Windows doesn't seem to be aware it's operating with a larger hard drive. So a question: if you increase the size of the hard drive using Image Tool, do you then have to tell Windows that it's got a bigger hard drive in some way? And can you do that, or do you have to ... groan ... reinstall Windows? I used Image Tool in the hopes I could avoid having to start from scratch again.
This thread http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=1481 has many posts with instructions. You have to expand the .hdd's capacity with image tool, then expand the NTFS partition inside it with something else. See the above thread for several ways to do it.
Many thanks. Looks like that thread should definitely be a sticky. In the process of trying it right now. Hopefully the additional drive space will solve the problem, but if it turns out to be multifactorial, I'll post back here.
