Missing Operating System after Compress with PD10

E

Erik2_again

Junior Member
Just installed PD10 and my VM resumed without any issues. I then decided to clean up some space. I did a shutdown of my VM, deleted snapshots, and then did Compress. After that my VM fails to start stating "Missing Operating System".
 
I have had disk image corruption already twice with PD10. Both times the image got broken in compress (reclaim disk space), wouldn't boot W7 anymore after compress. Hope you had backups, I did. Reclaim disk space must be badly broken...
 
I'm getting the same issue... but I can't stop it!

I was using PD9 on Monday morning, everything was fine. I upgraded to PD10 and upon starting the software was asked if I wanted to compress the disk, so I clicked yes... and everything since has gone downhill! I've spent over 5 hours on the phone to Parallels support, my case has now been raised to the level 2 team as apparently fixing this issue is not straightforward. I am now, three days later in a position where I CAN run PD10 from an external drive, but when I copy the file to my hard drive I get the same 'missing operating system' message, the machine I was using on Monday morning was a month old Mac Book Pro, today I have been to Apple and for reasons not relating to PD come away with a fancier model, I have just been running the PVM file from the external hard drive fine, copied to my brand new HDD and get the same 'missing operating system' message.

Can anyone shed any light on why this is happening, it's driving me mad! (and I run my accounts software via PD so I really need it to work!)

Thanks,

Rob
 
I had this same issue, apparently the bug is specific to VMs using split dynamic disks. I have had no issues since I converted my VMs to use a single file dynamic disk.

Apparently what was happening was that the space reclamation routine couldn't properly detect the empty space in the split images, and would delete more than just the empty space from each 2GB (max) chunk. Leaving VMs with an inoperable OS and several corrupted or missing personal files.

Convert all VMs to either single file (standard) dynamic disks or fixed disks for the time being.
 
BeebarbX said:
I had this same issue, apparently the bug is specific to VMs using split dynamic disks. I have had no issues since I converted my VMs to use a single file dynamic disk.

Apparently what was happening was that the space reclamation routine couldn't properly detect the empty space in the split images, and would delete more than just the empty space from each 2GB (max) chunk. Leaving VMs with an inoperable OS and several corrupted or missing personal files.

Convert all VMs to either single file (standard) dynamic disks or fixed disks for the time being.
Click to expand...

Thanks for your reply. What you've said makes sense but I'm struggling to understand how that would translate to my experience? My PVM file works perfectly when accessed from an external hard drive, but (since upgrading to PD10) gives the 'missing operating system' error message when accessed from my hard drive. The computer I am now trying to access the PVM file from has been replaced since I first experienced the issue on Monday morning and Apple have deleted all Parallels files from my old (1 month old) machine before my data was copied to the new one, I have since downloaded a fresh installation of PD10 and on a brand new machine, using a PVM file which works fine on a external hard drive, get the exact same error.

Rob

ETA: During my numerous phone calls with Parallels support one of the things they did was tick the box to break the Parallels files down into 2gb max chunks, thinking about this I assume my installation was as per your suggestion as to how it should be to prevent the issue so the error should have never occurred in the first place?

I'm confused?!
 
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Rob, your issue seems a bit different from my own. In many cases of 'missing operating system' or otherwise compromised VM disks, the case is usually the compression problem I had.

Your case however, seems it could be a bad VM file in general. When I had VM disk issues, I reinstalled the OS used in the VM. Just make sure you have a backup of your VM as it is now just in case. Sorry if I'm not much help.

If worst comes to worst and nothing solves your problem, you may have to completely recreate the VM, OS installation and all. Don't worry if it comes to that, because *.hdd files can be mounted on the desktop with Parallels Mounter (usually the default association), and you should be able to recover personal data from the defective VMs virtual disk.
 
Well, my issues have been sorted following a session with Parallels Level 2 support. I have no idea what the issue was as the lady on the phone seemed to be illusive when I queried how she'd solved the problem!
 
I have this problem on all of my multi-file virtual disks. I reported the problem, uploaded a test case and then was told that the fix might be in the next update. I asked for a workaround and never heard anything back.
 
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