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

B

Bertolt

Bit poster
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!
 
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.
 
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