Help: Screwed my boot camp partition with Parallels Tools for Boot Camp

Hi Guys,

I'm a new to macs, got my macbook last week. I wanted to set up parallels to invoke a bootcamp-WinXP right from the beginning without installing a virtual OS under MacOS (is that possible?). Here's what I did:

1. Got BootCamp, created a 10 GB partition, installed WinXP on it, everything worked fine.

2. Downloaded the new Parallels 3036 Beta. Before even installing it, I thought I would be clever and installed the Parallels Tools for Boot Camp package on my WinXP - prior to installing Parallels. So I installed it without having Parallels installed under MacOS. That was probably a stupid idea, because when the Parallels Tools for Boot Camp package asked me to restart and I tried to boot Windows, I got a text-based menu asking me to chose between two operating systems: WinXP and "Parallels configuration". I cannot do anything in that menu, the computer seems to be crashed, no keys work. Starting MacOS works fine.

Any suggestions for a dumb beginner?

Thanks, Bertolt

 

I did the same thing, and got the same problem.

Parallels seems to modify Windows' boot.ini file, and not in a good way. Normally there is a timeout feature, so even if you don't select one of the two boot options, it will just go with the default one.

So, I modified boot.ini using Parallels to access the XP VM while in OS X (right-click My Computer->Properties->Advanced tab->Startup and Recovery Settings...opening that dialog and clicking OK is enough because Windows detects that the timeout value isn't there or is invalid and fixes it for you). So, when I boot back to XP via BootCamp, I still can't select either one on the white-on-black screen, but the countdown happens and the "Windows XP" choice is selected. However, I'm still stuck in that it doens't boot to XP - it sends me to another white-on-black screen that makes me choose the a "Last Known Good Hardware Configuration." I guess this comes up because XP freaks out when you boot XP via BootCamp and then switch it to boot via the VM. Anyway, I don't know how to get past that screen (the keyboard still doesn't work).

It seems the real problem is that the keyboard doesn't work during bootup into Windows via BootCamp. I would think EFI would load the drivers for that beforehand, so I'm not sure why this is happening. Any suggestions would be great!

 

Found the answer here:
http://forum.parallels.com/thread6277.html
(post #10)

 

Thank you very much for the good advice. Funny thing is: After Switching on my MacBook today, the Keyboard was responding again when that b/w screen came up. Very strange.