No Bootable Drive available - XP already installed

J

joelmusic

Bit poster
I installed Parallels as a "trial" version 2 months ago, bought Windows XP Home, successfully installed and used Windows on my MacBook. Now, the trial expired, I bought Parallels, downloaded it, installed it, and now it can't see Windows installed on my computer.

What I have tried:
My boot sequence is Hard Disk, Floppy Disk, CD ROM
In my configuration editor I have the hard disk assigned to:
user/library/parallels/winxp/winxp.hdd
There are also other drives in there as I have experimented trying to make it work:
Clone of Parallels
winxp1
winxp2

Since I went through the whole installation process before, and have run XP on the trial version, am I missing something fundamentally wrong with how I am trying to run windows?

Thanks in advance!
:confused:
 
Strange. I Installed the final release on an RC(something) and got no problems (both with the trial key). The I bought the license and just inserted the code # into the requested menu/field.
Try booting from the FreeDOS HD (http://www.freedos.org) as HD #1 ("C") and set your Win HD as HD #2 ("E", supposing "D" is the CD-ROM). Then perfom some checks on it to verify if it is corrupted or something else.
I have no other ideas.. sorry...

PS: check permissions from Mac OS X Install CD.

Perform also an Uninstall from the installer package and reinstall. It may be that some lybraries are not well installed.
 
Last edited:
Thanks for your help. Before I try these things, I think I may be missing something fundamental about how this works. I already installed XP on my MacBook when I was using the Trial Version, and it worked fine. I then:

Downloaded the purchased version of Parallels
Un-installed the Trial version
Installed the new version
Now it doesn't see Windows on my hard drive.

Do I have to re-install Windows after this process? If so, should I un-install it first? I would think if I had successfully installed it on the Hard Drive, that I should be able to have Parallels find it as a Guest.

Anyway, again thanks for your help - I think I need some conceptual clarification before I attempt this.
 
Thanks Sharkus -

I have completely wiped my MacBook clean of all hdd's. I could see about 4 before I un-intsalled everything - however they all were pretty smal - not even a meg. Definitely not the 1.5 Gig one that has been mentioned. Basically, I should be able to see the hdd file, from spotlight, however, even before I deleted them, I made sure none of them had XP in them. very odd. Anyway, I am about to re-install everything, but I have a sneaking suspiscion that somewhere in this MacBook Windows is lurking, and I'd like to know where. If it is as cut-and-dried as - if there isn't an hdd file, then Windows isn't installed - then I'll head on and re-install Parallels and XP, in that order. However, I NEVER (I swear) deleted a hdd file with XP on it, and have felt like I am missing something fundamental here. Parallels tech support has been horrible -

Oh well, thanks for the reply - let me know if you have any ideas.
 
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