Help! VM shutting off unexpectedly at startup

[giovannig]

I installed Parallels for Mac yesterday with a Windows 2000 host. Everything went dandy yesterday and I could work just fine.

Today I start up and...

As soon as I start up, the machine starts loading Windows, then automatically goes into "stopped" mode. When I try restarting it, windows says it needs to check the "hard drive", which passes, then as soon as that is done the machine stops again.

Two notes:

1) The VM's hard disk image is on an external USB drive
2) I had left the VM suspended, not stopped, before quitting Parallels and shutting off the guest system last night.

Help! How do I get to my data now?

 

[giovannig]

Update

OK In the end I had to reinstall the OS again onto a new VM, and load the previously created disk image as a second hard drive.

Everything works quite well on the internal disk BUT every so often the VM shuts down unexpectedly if anything is done involving the second "drive" - the one that resides on the external disk.

I am afraid that there is a bug involving parallels and images residing on an external hard drive - now I have disabled the second hard disk and I am waiting to see what happens. But I'm stuck with an 8GB disk only!!