Mac OS X Server v.10.5 will not complete boot process.

[kreatre2009]

After installing, and configuring Mac OS X Sever v. 10.5 on Parallels 4 (build 3810), I can no longer get it to boot. As far as the process gets is the grey screen with the Apple logo and spinning gear icon. This virtual machine worked perfectly the last time it was used. In addition, I could not get Windows XP to launch either after it had worked normally the last time it was used. It seems that support for Parallels is non-existent since no one answers emails and I would have to PAY $30 to call someone which is ridiculous. If the software is this damned problematic, they have no business charging for support.

Back to my issue... I checked the Console log and it was no help. It merely shows the various stages that the launch process is going through and does not show any actual errors. In activity monitor, the process named prl_vm_app runs at over 100% of the CPU. Restarting my Mac had no effect. Uninstalling and reinstalling Parallels had no effect. I have trashed preferences, ran disk repair on my hard drive, ran permissions repair. None of these things do anything for the issue. Parallels 4 is just plain broken! I have never had this much trouble with a previous version. Has anyone else had this problem? I emailed support already. Apparently, they don't actually read my emails because I got a response back advising me to do something that had absolutely nothing to do with what I described in my email.

 

[Peter Canasius J L]

Hi kreatre,

To resolve the issue Follow the below mentioned steps.

1) Launch Parallels Desktop ( do not start the Windows )
2) Go to Configuration page => CPU => Manually change the number of CPUs to 1.

This should fix the issue.

 

[kreatre2009]

Useless advice!

Hi kreatre,

To resolve the issue Follow the below mentioned steps.

1) Launch Parallels Desktop ( do not start the Windows )
2) Go to Configuration page => CPU => Manually change the number of CPUs to 1.

This should fix the issue.

If you had actually READ my post, you would have noticed that I was not talking about running Windows. I am already running Mac OS X Server with one CPU. No, that did not fix the issue at all. Here's what did: I reverted to a previous build of Parallels Desktop and then did my install of OS X Server. After getting OS X Server running, I backed up the guest OS file and updated Parallels to the latest version.

I then began evaluating VMware Fusion to see if it would be better for me.