I moved my Windows 8 Preview VM to an external drive and now it won't boot

I'm running Parallels Desktop 7.0.15098. When I migrated my Mac OS X 10.7.4 Lion system to a new Mac, I decided to move two Parallels virtual machines, for Windows 8 Preview and Ubuntu, to an external hard drive, and to run them from there.

Now I can't get either of these virtual machines to boot up from Parallels.

In each case the virtual machine, either Windows 8 or Ubuntu, starts the bootup process, but immediately throws up an error message and says it needs to reboot, and goes into an infinite loop. There are no errors from the Parallels application; the errors are from within Windows 8 and Ubuntu.

Meanwhile I have another virtual machine of Windows 7 that is on the main system hard drive inside my MacBook Pro, and it runs perfectly fine under Parallels.

How can I repair this?

I'm on a new MacBook Pro 13-inch (mid 2012) with 4GB RAM and an internal 240GB solid-state drive. The external drive holding the Parallels virtual machines is a 7200 rpm 500GB drive connected via USB 3.0 (the new MacBooks have USB 3.0 on the motherboard).

 

Hi WheatW,

It sounds like the problem is not related to the VMs being on an external disk, but instead related to the new machine that they're running on. Specifically, it looks like there's an issue with Ivy Bridge CPUs. I'm seeing this same behavior, and Parallels support is aware of the issue.

Fingers crossed that this won't take too too long to resolve.

 

Fortunately my Windows 7 64-bit virtual machine located on the same system hard drive as the Parallels application has no trouble with the new system, regardless of the reason. You suggest it may be the new Ivy Bridge Intel i5 dual-core CPU; I suspect that the problem is with the new Apple USB 3.0 interface to an external USB 3.0 hard drive, but I have no evidence for that.

Since I don't urgently need to use these other two errant virtual machines every day, I will be patient and wait. But since there is no way for me to boot into either of them under any circumstances that I can identify, I hope I won't have to just wipe them out and build new virtual machines to get them to work.

 

Ah, I forgot to mention that I've only seen these errors reported for Windows 8 and Linux-based OSs. I've seen reports of Windows 7 running fine in Parallels on the new Ivy Bridge CPUs. So, you might be able to run your Windows 7 VM just fine on the external drive.

 

The problem has been resolved with Parallels 7.0.15104, for Ubuntu and Windows 8.

When I first started the Windows 8 Preview virtual machine, Windows 8 went through several long cycles of "attempting to repair volume" and rebooting, but eventually it booted correctly.