My Mac crashed while I was working in Parallels and I had to force reboot. Now when I try to start up parallels, the Windows XP installation asks me how I want to start up XP and when I pick Normal or Safe modes, it quickly shows a blue screen and then goes back to rebooting up again. If you know how I could fix this that'd be great, but otherwise I just need some files from the virtual hard disk. Would it be possible for me to get those files off of the virtual hard disk without being able to start up the virtual machine?
Is this a Boot Camp installation? You'll need to Repair your XP installation. I had to and it worked okay.. but Parallels could no longer work with my Boot Camp installation. I ended up reinstalling Boot Camp. Rail
You should be able to perform a "repair" installation of Windows from ther original Windows install disk. If that doesn't work, and if this is a standard VM (non Bootcamp), you'll be able to create another fresh VM and then attach your broken VM as an additional hard drive so that you can copy over the neccessary data files.