OMG..I am SO screwed....

I had a "mac dr" over to fix my network and since I have had parallels, I have not used the boot camp side, per se. He deleted my Boot Camp, with my permission, because I told him I only used the parallels side and not boot camp. well, my parallels is GONE. When I try to get into windows via parallels, it wants to INSTALL WINDOWS. Is ther any recovery? I lost financials, photo sessions, business contacts.....I am ill.

 

Look in spotlight for "winxp.hdd"

 

which is why you always make spare copies (backups) of all your data files. Especially in Windows!!
Good luck in recovering your data.

 

See if you still have the .hdd file as suggested above.

This is for me the PRIMARY reason that I use ONLY .hdd files rather than a bootcamp partition on the disk...

If I EVER need to send my MBP in for repair.. I've always got a 1-2 day old copy of my .hdd file saved off on another disk. Simply re-install parallels and point to the restored .hdd and windows is back up and running... almost instantly!

 

Did your Parallels installation use the Windows installed on the Boot Camp partition? If so, deleting that partition will obviously have deleted the Windows installation.

But if you used a disk image in Parallels (i.e. NOT the Boot Camp installation of Windows), deleting the Boot Camp partition does not affect your Windows installation in Parallels, you can recover your Windows installation by checking the Parallels folder in your home directory and starting the Windows installation in Parallels.

 

In the last upgrade, my wife's Parallels installation went totally toxic -- blue-screening with an "Inaccessible boot device error" from the Windows instance hosted by Parallels.

No useful information of course on the forums on how to fix that.

What I did to *recover files in the Parallels hard disk image* was:

1. Burn a bootable CD copy of miniPE2-XT (google miniPE)

2. Boot the Parallels Windows VM from MiniPE

3. Run the appropriate disk recovery/master boot record reconstruction tools embedded in miniPE on the .hdd image (did not fix the problem, as there was nothing actually wrong with the Windows disk image)

4. Run the network services module of miniPE and connect the virtual machine to a file server share on my LAN (could have used FTP as well, since it is also built into miniPE)

5. Recover the files from the .hdd image and copy them off to a server elsewhere on my network

6. Blow the Parallels installation away completely and start again.

Get miniPE. It'll save your butt. Particularly since it appears Parallels is getting less stable and reliable, not *more* stable and reliable. Funny thing, that...

 

Sounds like a good (if tedious) solution. However, if there was really nothing wrong with the .hdd file as you indicate, it sounds like the problem lay with your Parallels installation. So couldn't you have simply deleted and reinstalled Parallels and achieved the same effect? Also, Parallels' new image tool would have let you recover files directly from the .hdd file had you needed to do so.

This takes nothing away from your suggestion, which I shall certainly follow.