Really frustrated with this product. Ran Boot Camp assistant, got XP installed with all the Boot Camp drivers, working fine. Open the box, install Parallels. Fire it up. It instantly sees my Boot Camp install of XP and offers to load it up. Great. Immediately I get a message about how this is the first time I'm using this VM, so Parallels Tools need to be installed, click to proceed. Fantastic, everything seems to be going fine. "Don't do anything in the VM until install of Parallels Tools is complete" - OK. I proceed and I'm greeted with a solid black screen in the VM. Fast forward to about 2 hours later - still a plain black screen. Hmmm... should it really be taking this long? I remember the message about not touching the VM, but it seems to be hung. I stop it and get a warning about allowing the guest OS to shutdown properly (Sure, but how can I do that when there is no GUI displayed?). Force it to stop, and sure enough, XP will no longer boot through Boot Camp. Re-format the partition and install XP in Boot Camp again. Remove and re-install Parallels Desktop. This time, I think I'll be smart and patch Parallels before running it, which I do (5582). Fire it up again. Same nice prompt to use my Boot Camp install, same message, and now we're at about 1 hour again of waiting. "Activity Monitor" says Parallels is using "102 CPU" I do NOT want to lose my Windows install again, so I'm not touching it. How long should the VM screen simply be blank?
Hello Jchris91739, You should update to 5584. What is your VM RAM? You can check this in Configuration Editor. How much memory is allocated to Parallels? Please look up in Parallels Desktop -> Preferences -> Memory. Do you launch Parallels when no other applications are running? What is your Mac RAM? Best regards, Xenos
