This is my first use of this forum so please be gentle if I make mistakes. Last Friday I was working on another co-workers Mac. I only opened my Mac to check an IP address. I did NOT have Parallels runnning at all on my MacBook Pro. My Mac was on, in sleep mode, during this time. At the end of my shift I came over to my Mac, looked at the dock to verify all programs were shut down, they were. Parallels was not running. I am emphasizing these points because of what I found Monday when I turned my Mac on. When I started Parallels 5608 Monday am, it opened with the GUI to load as OS. There was apparently no longer XP Pro loaded on my Mac. Not being an expert Parallels user I thought that maybe it just needed the Serial Number reentered for some reason. I entered the number and then inserted the WinXp Pro disk and it loaded it. Obviously all of my Windows mapping, permissions and folders are gone. I contacted our IT department and they tried to copy the .pvs and .hdd file from another Mac in our department. They were unsuccessful. They told me the files were not the right files for those Macs to operate with. They are the files that the system is pointing to to function. Now for my main concern/question. Why would the OS disappear after a shutdown. The IT department here is telling me that I was doing an update on Parallels and shut down with it still trying to load. I was not even at my Mac! Can any one tell me if they have had this happen and what they came to as a solution,Please?!
It is hard to say exactly why suddenly it got corrupted However I am afraid, I know what happened later there were diskdecriptor.xml corruption, and you reformatted old Windows, disk erasing all data. If there was backup, probably it would be possible to retrieve data or even restire VM
Thank you for your Quick Reply. I realized right after it started reading from the WinXP disk that I was toasted. Unfortunately my backup hard drive had a much older version of Parallels so it couldn't help me. I will do a backup of the disk after I have it all working again, and after every update. I've learned my lesson that hard way I guess. I was hoping that if someone had it happen to them they could give me hope. Thanks again John for you help!
