Parallels 14 and Mac OS Mojave - Windows 7 crash in Snapshot

As it says in the title, I have Parallels 14, Mac OS Mojave and Windows 7. I was away from the machine and it appears that a Snapshot failed to complete. Now I can't boot Windows. I have tried Force Quit, reboot, and now Windows just boots to a blank screen - no error, no BSOD. Please advise.

 

Hi @Beermati , please try Actions > Reset and check if that helps.

 

Hi Arun - I tried that and it just kept spinning the wheel. I did 'Stop', 'Reset', I stopped from Activity Monitor, rebooted Mac - all multiple times. The Windows machine either (1) went to blank screen, (2) once tried to start Repair System and hung, (3) twice said Booting from RAID 1, and finally successfully ran System Repair and booted up. I don't know what caused the problem, but read others have had some problems with Snapshots, Mojave and Parallels 14. Should I disable snaphots to avoid further problems? Thanks!

 

Hi @Beermati , this issue can happen due various reasons . You can delete the snapshots if you think its taking too much space on your mac. Please take a back up of your virtual machine which is always suggested.

 

Ok - thanks. I just recently learned about the need to backup VM. This is accomplished by backing up the PVM?

Does the PVM include the data files (documents, spreadsheets, photos, etc.) as well, or just the files needed to run the VM?

A couple other questions:
- My pvm is 268GB, but my VM HD is only 128GB - the PVM seems very large?

- I'm having a few other problems with Windows: there's an issue with Windows Update as everytime I boot, after a few minutes the shutdown button will include 4 updates. When I shutdown the updates appear to install, but upon rebooting, the typical 'complete installation' does not occur - and after a few minutes the 4 update re-appear. If I try to manually run Windows Update from the Control Panel, the window has a red icon and when I click 'check for updates' I receive a message saying 'can't check for updates because the service isn't running'.

- Also, I tried to run Computer Management and received an error that "MMC could not create the snap shot" I searched MS website and there were numerous methods (ranging from editing registry to running sfc from cmd prompt) - what is the recommended solution?

- Finally, the snapshots don't seem to be helping and may be hurting. If I want to delete, I can disable in Configuration tab, but do I then delete each snapshot individually? It takes a significant amount of time to delete each one.

 

The PVM file contains the entire windows operating system and the files which are stored inside the virtual machine. The PVM bundle contains the virtual hard disk along with the snapshot files. Hence, the size of the PVM bundle will always be greater than the Windows C drive. Regarding the Windows updates error, please follow the instructions from this article to check and fix the Windows errors and try updating once again which should work properly.