Interesting corrupted hard drive problem.

Hi

This is my first post so go easy ;-)

I'm an Apple specialist in London and I have a few clients in the music business who travel with their laptops, and sometimes need running repairs done.

Please note that so far I have not got my hands on this machine but hopefully will do very shortly. As usual I'm expected to work miracles instantly.

A few days ago I had a call from a highly valued customer with a Mac Book Pro 15" I didn't supply (don't have many other details but it has 2Gb of memory). Whilst on tour about six months ago he had purchased Parallels 2 and Win XP Pro and had one of his entourage install it. So far, so good, apart from the fact that he neglected to tell me this.

He said he had noticed a few problems recently with his computer, mainly with AOL and iTunes. I asked a few questions and worked out that he had about 300k of space on his internal hard drive? Told him to dump his iPhoto library onto a DL DVD and delete the one on the HD until I could get a bigger HD installed. He did this. Two days later, before he got back to the UK, he rang to say his computer was making a 'clicking' sound in the bottom left corner. HD going twang was my first thought. After quite a bit of 'stress' I talked to the sound engineer in his crew and got him to go out and purchase a 250Gb Western Digital 2.5" HD and a FireWire enclosure. At this point I would have told them to use SuperDuper to clone the HD but Leopard 10.5.1 had been installed (over 10.4) and I've heard of some issues so went with this option (remember this was over the phone to a mobile on a noisy stage somewhere and the HD could have gone completely at any time).

Install 10.5.1 with all updates on external HD using FW enclosure.
Boot from external and use Migration Assistant to move his account across.
Check everything is working okay. At this point I still did not know about the Parallels/XP installation.
Got the sound engineer (great guy) to replace the old HD with the new one using the take-apart guide on www.ifixit.com.
Boot the Mac Book Pro.

Everything was spiffy, and I was beginning to congratulate myself on yet another avoidable crisis solved (and already spending my fee) when the dread words "Hold on!, It's not working properly" were spoken.

At this point I found out that Parallels had been installed, and the disks for Parallels and XP were not available. All the info I got was that he was trying to click the icon in the Applications folder and it was not launching before he was whisked away to a rehearsal.

I'm now going to get access to the machine and have a new copy of Parallels 3 and a new OEM copy of Windows XP Pro SP2 ready and waiting.

Sorry about the long explanation, but I thought it better to give you the circumstances as well as the technical stuff.

My question is, after using Migration Assistant have I any chance now of resurrecting the Para/XP combo using new installs or the new disks, or will I have to re-install both? If the latter, what are the chances that any Windows data will be retained. I also don't know if he was using any Windows software beyond Media Player and Internet Exploder.

Your views and experience would be appreciated.

TIA

 

Hello,

after upgrading to Leopard it is always better to reinstall Parallels Desktop. We recommend to use Parallels Desktop 3.0 (build 5584) because it has better compatibility with Leopard.
After using Migration Assistant does .hdd file present on the laptop?
If so, it is possible to create a new VM using existing .hdd file. Thus, all old files will not be removed.

Best regards,
Stacey

 

Hi Stacey

Thanks for your prompt reply.

I'll install Parallels 3 and try and mount the .hdd. I've already gone through the Knowledge Base and intended to do this anyway, but I wanted to check if anyone had some pearls of wisdom after having something similar happen (and using Migration Assistant).

 

If you have any other questions, feel free to ask me.

Best regards,
Stacey

 

Hi Stacey

Just to let you know that I installed V3 Build 5584. Everything went fine and the customer is very happy it only took about 10 minutes from start to finish. My original enquiry was really to find out if Migration Assistant was able to move a Virtual HD with Windows in it.

Many thaks for your advice.

 

LondonDealer,
I am glad that this issue was resolved and everything is working fine now.

Best regards,
Stacey