Hard disk image corrupted

In order to prevent system slowdown due to fragmentation those 10 Gb should be left alone for padding, 10 GB free in a 160 GB disk for me is a disk full.

 

Some good news, but not all good

Ynot, John, everyone,

We have partial success! THANK YOU!

Followed the last instructions and was able to restart the Virtual Machine and my files seemed to be intact as of 12 days ago. - I thank you all.

That is the Good.

This is the Bad:

Virtual Machine still insists on capping the maximum RAM at 412 MB, even though it had always been 512 MB before - and there has been no change in hardware.

Within the Windows XP VM:
All of the things that opened at startup failed. ALL, including things like Yahoo IM, AIM and EverNote which are usually well behaved. Strange DLL error messages, but all related to items that load on boot.

Got an odd collection of printer errors - all for printers that were not connected, never connected, never owned, pretty sure I didn't even have drivers installed for them. FYI, usually print to PDF and email stuff back the office to print, so this is just weird.

My Windows XP desktop was a mess, with some icons hidden.

These can all be fixed, just figured you want to see the errata report.

Thinking that reinstalling Parallels might clear some of that up, but that will have to wait until I'm back in my office. Do you have any thoughts? Hoping these are all small problems, are they?


But, this is the UGLY:

From within the Windows XP VM, Drive C (the representation of the HDD with the trouble) Properties says the following:

Capacity: 68.3 GB
Used: 49 GB
Free: 19.2 GB

This was for a drive set up to be an "Expanding Drive" with a target capacity of 70 GB.
Shouldn't it be smaller than 70 GB and 'expaning' up to 70 GB?

68.3 GB seems reasonable for formatting a 70 GB drive...

But the actual size of the HDD package is 93 GB !
WHY?

Ynot said there was a problem with the Snapshot.xml file, think I need help with that.

There is what looks to be a bad snapshot, which was (almost) made when all of this happened. Does that get included in the merge? Or should it be deleted?

Not going to merge snapshot just yet, need to get caught up on 12 days of missed work, and right now I'm also backing up all of my files - just in case

From what I've read, Parallels Compressor works form within the Windows VM to free up excess space being consumed by big HDD files, like mine. But it seems that Compressor doesn't like Snapshots, does that mean that the Snapshots need to to be deleted?

Need to know how this all happened, to keep it from happening again.
Also, what is the most practical way to backup? Cloning? Copying hds files? What?

Greatly appreciate everything you've done, but I still need a little help

Thank you again

 

It caps at 412 MB because that's probably the maximum continuous space it can find on the drive for paging.

My advice? Get your important files out of there, clean up your disk, and start a fresh Windows installation.

For backup copy the corresponding Parallels folder with the .pvs and .hdd file included and anything else that's in there.

 

Yes, this the first to do

 

Still problems

John, Ynot, Everyone,

My VM is running again, but running badly. Definitely some damage to the XP boot area of the virtual disk. I'll give you a full errata list later if you want.

Big problem now is the VERY BIG HDD package. MUST make it smaller while retaining all data.
How do I do that?

These are my limitations:

Real disks:
Internal 160 Gb, 10 Gb Free
External 100 Gb, 95 Gb Free

On the Internal disk is the overly huge HDD package: 93.5 Gb.

Within the VM, that is the Windows XP C Drive:
Capacity: 68.3 GB
Used: 49 GB
Free: 19.2 GB

This was for a drive set up to be an "Expanding Drive" with a target capacity of 70 GB.

How do I make it smaller?

At present: No install disks, no backups other than the full backup of the huge 93.5 Gb VM.

Really would like to get it all in 70 Gb, with all of my apps, files and XP OS intact.

HOW?


To save you time and suggestions:

Parallels Compressor FAILED
Crashed the VM the second time, first time had not indication it was running except for the drop down menu changing to "cancel compressor"
Third time it said all Snapshots had to be deleted, so I did (backed up first) but still it failed.
Still will not work on that HDD.

Parallels Image Mounter and Parallels Explorer can see the HDD fine.

When the VM started all of the earlier snapshots were missing, even though they were still seen in the folder in Finder.
Made a NEW snapshot, and that was backed up too. That made a new snapshot.xml - also backed up.
Did a test revert to the new snapshot.
Very very slow startup, still with the same errors of every application that boots at XP startup.

The Desktop is scrambled on revert, also there are odd graphic artifacts left on the screen within the VM window. They do not go away on repeatedly restarting XP, nor on restarting the VM, but they do clear up moving windows around.

Restarted again, and again since. The Desktop stopped getting scrambled last time, but it still floats the task bar and those graphics artifacts persist.

Presently all snapshots were removed.

I did backup my files safely, only the files, not the OS and applications. Unfortunately it is only temporary. Basically they are in a corner of a linux server. Very appreciative to all of you that this even was possible, thanks again. This is good, but can't relax about it.

Still have no idea what caused this corrupted HDD, and thinking that if the finite drive space contributed to the problem, it is likely to recur. This has me worried. So, need to make that HDD way smaller, fast.

Please let me know what do

 

Dude, the virtual disk is clearly corrupted. I reiterate, get your important files out of there, discard that virtual disk and VM and install windows from scracth on a new one (this will also resolve your space problem).

You'll never be sure that any fix will permanently resolve the problem, and you can't ever be sure that there's no corruption in some of the data even if it all seems to work fine. It's safer just to dump it and start fresh.

 

I agree with Specimen, the best solution is to retrieve data, Microsoft also recomends to reinstall Windows in case of hardware failure (virtual disk corruption)

 

Oh, and from what I read about the myriad of snapshots in your setup, perhaps it isn't a good thing to rely so much on snapshots, snapshots are diffs (record just what's different from the original), subsequent snapshots are diffs of diffs, this doesn't look to me as a particularly robust system in terms of data integrity, because instead of adding redundancy (the way data integrity is normally improved, duplication/copying being the simplest form of redundancy) you're making the opposite, relying more and more on a single point, a corrupted snapshot will make all subsequent snapshots corrupted too, then when merged will corrupt the data on the virtual disk.

 

Does Parallels corrupt a third exfat partition?

Hello, I installed Parallels on a MBP quad i7 with three partitions, the third (middle) partition as an ExFAT format so that I can read/write to it from both operating systems. The Mac Bootcamp installations works fine and as desired. But then I installed Parallels and while it seemed to work fine, I found that sometimes it would reset the third partition to FAT, losing all data on that partition (I think Parallels is doing this, as I uninstalled it and the behavior stopped).

Is there a known issue in this regard? Any clues?

Yours,
John

 

Today I've started my virtual machine. After that my macbook hung up and I had to press the power button until it went down.
Then i started my macbook again and ran my virtual machine and it didn't boot anymore. I found out, that my virtual hdd image is corrupted. Even the parallels mounter wasn't able to mount it. So I ran through many of the KBs out of the parallel support knowledge base. No one worked.
What can I do to get my machine back? I really need it so that I can work with it again. All the business processes of the company I work are in it.

Thanks a lot in advance!

 

I was reading this topic while have serious problems with empty xls file and probably damaged hds file. I have found a solution for to recover 100% of my information. Below are steps to perform. Hope it will help somebody:

1. Backup everything you actually have. Make a copy for next steps.
2. Rename latest hds file (snapshot) to xxx.hdd. Convert this file to get a package using Parallels Image Tool (PIT).
3. With PIT convert image (package) to plane format.
4. Open plane hdd file (will need to rename to .hds if on MacOS) with R-Studio (Shareware, http://www.r-studio.com). Perform Scan and save scan information.
5. Select objects you need and press Recover Selected.


Thanks to:
Pink Runner
dakine

 

You can directly recover your data from .hds or .hdd files by copying them to a Windows computer and then use this Parallels data recovery utility

 

Anyone tried this suggestion? My windows 10 was corrupted yesterday.

 

I am running windows 10 on MAC using parrall desktop and its running very good all my data and app their but yesterday it suddenly stop working and showing attached image error , I try to run disk utilities first aid but soil not working, could any one help how to recover my windows with out formatting or deleting files.