Help! Virtual Machine Not Available...

[Steve Lomas]

I've been running XP Pro as VM on Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac, for a couple of months now, and after a couple of weeks of tweaking it has been working great. I am running Mac OS 10.5.8 and Parallels Build 4.0.3846). I have a brand new macBook Pro, with 4GB RAM.

I left my VM running over night, unattended, last night, and this morning I discovered that it was frozen up. I had to reboot, forcing the VM to STOP. It restarted just fine, but I noticed that had lost some data from yesterday's work session...

So I decided to use time machine to roll back to a previous version of my XP.pvm file from yesterday afternoon.

After restoring, Parallels Desktop for Mac, is now giving me an error message stating, " The virtual file is not available." The details of the error message state that the virtual machine's files have been moved or deleted. One of the options is to locate the files. I am not sure if I am supposed to poit this to my .pvm file or to the virtual HDD file, but neither seem to be working.

Any thoughts from the community, would be most appreciated...

I have called customer support, was was politely hung up on my an automated attendant that stated that they were basically overwhelmed with support calls. I purchased a support incident online and after taking my money was was redirected to the same phone number to be rejected again. I tried online chat -- CLOSED. I submitted a support ticket, but have little confidence as to when and if I will receive support.

In the meantime, this is my main machine and I have got to get this up an running!

Thanks, SL

 

[BryanTom]

Do you have another Mac computer you could move your virtual machine to and install parallels on it to see if you can import the VM? I'm guessing that the restored name is just missing a link somewhere. You may also be able to run parallels desktop and choose the import virtual machine option - I'm just stabbing in the dark, but I noticed you posted this quite some time ago.

 

[Steve Lomas]

Resolution!

Thanks, Bryan!

I had a similar notion. I realized that the Parallels support team was not getting back to me anytime soon, so I decided to get experimental...

Fortunately, restoring to the most recent TimeMacjine backup, put everything right and I was able to get back to work. I have a theory that the .PVM and .HDD file must be synchronous. In other words (again this is only a theory) the reason my backup didn't work is because the .PVM pre-dated the last modified date of the .HDD file.

I would love to have this confirmed by someone. I would like to speak to Parallels support about this, but as of this writing the only contact has been automated emails suggesting I go online to find a solution-- and I paid for this

Hopefully, I will eventually get a chance to speak to Support. I will of course share whatever I learn.

SL