File Corruption - Out of the Blue?

Hi,

I looked at a few KB articles and a few postings from this forum after Googling but I am not sure that any of them are the solution to my issue so I don't want to go down the path of messing with the .hdd file or deleting .mem or .sav files unless I am supposed to. I am running Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac - Build 5608 (June 2008) on a Macbook Pro that's fairly recent (6 months old or so). I have been running Parallels on the machine with a Windows XP installation on it since day one. I have created several snapshots with different branches and forks. Some have certain software versions running and others have different configurations for testing. Everything has worked fine for 6+ months.. until about 15 minutes ago.

I was doing testing and reverting back to the previous Snapshot. I did this 3 times so far today (I do this a lot). On the fourth try.. nothing spectacular happened or changed.. it would not let me revert back to the Snapshot. I get the message "An error occurred during reverting to snapshot. Error code is 419502682" and of course it does not load the Snapshot. If I press the green "play" button to start the VM up.. I get this message:

"Virtual machine cannot be started because of the following problem:

Parallels Desktop is unable to access the virtual hard disk image file /Users/myusername/Documents/Parallels/XP/winxp.hdd. The file is corrupted."

I can see the file is definitely there (corrupted I don't know) and the "Snapshots" folder has a ton of files.. .mem, .png, .pvc, .sav. My "winxp.hdd" file is about 16.5 GB.

Any ideas?

 

Please backup your Virtual machine (please copy the entire folder for Virtual machine to the safe place)and try to perform steps described in http://kb.parallels.com/en/4680

Please note, that in this case, snapshots will be lost

Another suggestion is to merge snapshots, please note, that all data will be there but all Snapshots will be gone

 

Hi John,

Thanks for the reply. When you say all the data will be there.. what does that mean exactly? I really don't have any "data" as in.. documents, pictures, etc that were added to it. The real value was in the different software that was installed and different patch levels for testing on each different snapshot. If I have Office 2003 installed on one Snapshot and Office 2007 on another and then another path with different Windows patches... does this mean I lose all of that? I couldn't imagine that I would lose all the snapshots and some how keep this all installed.

Reading the KB article (I saw this one yesterday) it wasn't real clear to me where state I would be left at. Here is an example tree (if it shows up) of how my installs looked.

Original XP install ---> patches (snapshot) ---> more patches (fully patched + IE7) (snapshot)
|
---------------> no patches + a few particular software installs (snapshot) -----> Office 2007 (snapshot)
|
--------------> Office 2003 (snapshot) ----------> Running additional software (snapshot)

I have a few other additional snapshots somewhere (don't have the parallels install in front of me). It basically died off when I was reverting back to Office 2003 snapshot. So I guess my two questions are:

1) If I follow the kb article that's described.. what state will I be back at.. how much do I lose?

2) How can I prevent this from happening? Does running different software for testing and continually reverting back to previous snapshots corrupt the .hdd file and is this issue potentially fixed in Version 4?

Thanks

Steven

 

1) If I follow the kb article that's described.. what state will I be back at.. how much do I lose?

Original XP install ---> patches (snapshot) ---> more patches (fully patched + IE7) (snapshot)
|
2) How can I prevent this from happening? Does running different software for testing and continually reverting back to previous snapshots corrupt the .hdd file and is this issue potentially fixed in Version 4?

Fixed in version 4, as for version 3, backup VM folder, this will prevent such situations