"file not found" error in Office 365 / path problems

[DennisK7]

Hi everybody,

I'm facing an error with accessing files in a windows 10 VM, especially with Office 365:

• When I want to open an existing Office-file (no matter if Powerpoint, Word, Excel) from my Mac, I get the error e.g. "Microsoft XYZ can't access the file 123." (maybe I translated it wrong - I'm using German language)
• When I create a new file and want to save it locally in the Win10-VM, Office crashes without error
• Besides, I noticed in another application (WISO Buchhaltung), that I can not change the paths in the settings anymore - it just offers me to select "root" and no other paths
• (Further then this: I can not pin icons to the taskbar anymore. As soon as I close the application, the Icon disapears again)

What I tried so far:

• Re-installed parallels
• Re-installed Win10 from iso-image and by selecting in the parallels-wizzard
• Re-installed office 365 as well as the other application
• Re-installed Parallels tools
• Changed the hardware-type from "NVME" to "SATA" in parallel's hardware-settings of the VM
• Tried to fix it according to: https://kb.parallels.com/en/115026

These errors are somehow strange. I can reproduce them (even after reinstalling everything) and I know that it worked in the same environment/settings before because I reinstalled Catalina after changing my SSD.
My current system (in brackets: what changed to the previously environment where it was running):

• MacBook Pro 13" early 2015
• Latest Version, fresh installed Catalina (before: updated from Mojave)
• SSD: Samsung 970 Evo M.2 1 TB (before: original Apple 512GB HDD)
  
• Parallels 15.1.1 (47117)
• Latest Version of Win10
• Latest Version of Office from Office 365-business-account

Did anybody suffer from similar problems or has some ideas what/ where to check next? Is it possible that this problem comes from changing the SSD or is connected to some file-permissions in the host-system?

 

[Maria@Parallels]

Hi, could you share the screenshots of the error you get, please?

 

[DennisK7]

Hi Maria,

sorry for the late reply - unfortunately, I didn't get an email notification and just saw the answer.
I attached a screenshot of the error as soon as I try to open a file (by double-clicking on it in the file explorer; the file is stored in c: and works fine with office 365 for mac under osx)

 

[DennisK7]

Additional note:
When I open e.g. Word, create a blank file, and try to store it (under c:\users\[name]\documents), Word does not do anything (no error, no freeze - I can click on "save" and nothing happens). All in all, the behaviour of Office and other programs is quiet strange (sometimes crashes, sometimes errors, sometimes nothing at all), but repeatable. And always related to reading/ writing files to the vm-internal windows-drive or the shared host-mac-drive.

PS: I am using a symlink for my desktop-folder on OSX. I know about troubles with this - previously mentioned file haven't been stored in this folder, but does the symlink influence the installation-process of parallels and thus I have problems with it?

 

[Maria@Parallels]

Hi Maria,

sorry for the late reply - unfortunately, I didn't get an email notification and just saw the answer.
I attached a screenshot of the error as soon as I try to open a file (by double-clicking on it in the file explorer; the file is stored in c: and works fine with office 365 for mac under osx)

Translation of the error will be very appreciated.
Also does this issue appear with any MS Office files?

 

[DennisK7]

Hi Maria,
here is the translation: "PowerPoint can not read [pathname]".
Yes, the problem appears with all MS Office files.

 

[DennisK7]

Solved it myself now.

Solution:
I used symlinks for the Desktop and Documents folders pointing to another folder. During the installation, parallels seems to write into these folders some systems-settings which caused the error, that you can not read files on the host from inside the VM. I couldn't identify why/ which files the parallels-installation writes, but when I removed the symlinks and re-installed parallels and the Win10-VM it worked fine.

If you want to use symlinks anyway, you can (maybe) set them up after installing parallels. That is how I did it in osx mojave previously and it worked fine. For osx catalina, I didn't try it again (I'm working without symlinks now because I have to set up several VMs later and want to avoid further issues).