Parallels 4.0 causes kernel panic in Snow Leopard, cannot uninstall

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Daniel Slomovits

Bit poster
I bought PD4.0 a while back when I was still running Tiger, and set up a boot camp partition as a VM. A couple weeks ago I upgraded to Snow Leopard, and a few days later I started having intermittent kernel panics. The panic logs point to com.parallels.kext.prl_hypervisor. So I tried uninstalling Parallels (planning to reinstall it). The uninstall said it went fine, but it never deleted /Applications/Parallels or /Applications/Parallels Desktop.app, and trying to restart the computer (which the uninstaller says to do) then immediately triggered a kernel panic (during the shutdown process). I tried again with the same results.

I can post the panic logs here if needed, but mainly I'd like to know how to manually remove Parallels (all the files that need to be removed, and how to safely unload and delete the kexts) so I can try reinstalling.
 
Please start /Application/Utilities/Terminal and execute next commands:

1) sudo rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions/prl_*
2) sudo touch /System/Library/Extensions

and then reboot the Mac
 
Last edited:
I've made a typo: there should be -rf flag for rm command and touch should be executed with sudo (I've already edited previous message), so the correct sequence is

Elric said:
1) sudo rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions/prl_*
2) sudo touch /System/Library/Extensions
Click to expand...
 
Thank you. I actually figured out a different way to get rid of the kexts—they were still loaded, and simply unloading them (with kextunload) enabled the system to reboot properly and remove them.

I am not sure, at this point, whether the kernel panic problem has been resolved.

I have another problem, however. Parallels Tools is being extremely unreliable—about half the time when I start my VM, Coherence is unable to activate. Restarting the VM usually fixes the problem.

So how can I completely, manually, uninstall Parallels Tools from the Windows side? I am assuming that the included uninstaller is not functioning correctly, because reinstalling using that does not help.
 
Daniel Slomovits said:
Thank you. I actually figured out a different way to get rid of the kexts—they were still loaded, and simply unloading them (with kextunload) enabled the system to reboot properly and remove them.

I am not sure, at this point, whether the kernel panic problem has been resolved.
Click to expand...
It depends on the version that was used before upgrade.. If it was something below than 3844, then the problem with panic was likely solved. Most significant fixes for kernel panics were done in 3810 and some in 3844.

Daniel Slomovits said:
I have another problem, however. Parallels Tools is being extremely unreliable—about half the time when I start my VM, Coherence is unable to activate. Restarting the VM usually fixes the problem.

So how can I completely, manually, uninstall Parallels Tools from the Windows side? I am assuming that the included uninstaller is not functioning correctly, because reinstalling using that does not help.
Click to expand...
Likely it is ok with uninstaller (from Control Panel -> Add/Remove programs)

If you are running the latest version, I'll contact the person responsible for coherence with this question. Let me know if your version is already 4.0.3846
 
I was using 3846 before, but I had originally installed Parallels on Tiger (I think 3810), applied the upgrades to get to 3846, and then upgraded to Snow Leopard. Somewhere in that process I think something went wrong, and hopefully a clean install of 3846 will solve it. I didn't have a kernel panic last night, so that's promising.

And I reinstalled Parallels completely, so I'm running 3846 as a clean install (no upgrade patches applied). I haven't reinstalled Tools yet—I'll let you know what happens when I do.

Thank you for your help.
 
I used the uninstaller, but it didn't get rid of everything so I had to follow the steps in this article:

http://kb.parallels.com/en/5116

I then restarted Windows and used the "Install Parallels Tools..." menu item. The installation appeared to go correctly and Windows restarted, but Parallels Tools (and by extension Coherence) is definitely not working. Here's how things look:

* The Parallels Tools statusbar icon says Tools are installed
* Mouse sync works
* As far as I know, time sync works
* Clipboard sync does not appear to work
* Shared Folders appears to work, but Parallels doesn't think they do—see next
* Under Virtual Machine Configuration, most of the panes in the "Features" area display this message:
"These settings are not in effect now as Parallels Tools are not installed or currently unavailable."
The SmartMount and SmartGuard panes do not show this message, and the Services pane shows a similar but somewhat different message. Yet Shared Folders sorta seem to be working anyway (Coherence certainly isn't).
* Shared folders work, but not, I don't think, the way they're supposed to. Under My Network Places, there are two entries: "Home on .psf" and "Host on .psf". "Home on .psf" is just my Home folder, "Host on .psf" is my entire hard drive. Somehow I don't think they're both supposed to be there, since under Configuration... > Shared Folder I have only "Share Mac OS X folders with Windows > All disks" selected.
* File drag-and-drop works—I can open an HTML file on my Mac in Firefox on Windows by drag and drop. It's getting at the file through \.psf\Host\ even though the file is in my Home folder (this seems correct, though, since I don't think \.psf\Home should be there in the first place).

In short, Parallels Tools is seriously screwed up, and inconsistently so.

I'm now restarting that VM, and here's how things look:

* For the first ~30sec after reaching the Windows desktop, Windows is completely unresponsive. It doesn't even acknowledge the presence of the mouse—the cursor changes when mousing into the Parallels window, but mousing over buttons does not cause them to change color like it normally does, clicking has no effect, and keyboard input appears to be completely ignored.
* The message in the configure dialog, about "These settings are not in effect...", is gone, but Coherence still doesn't work, Shared Folders is still doubled, and clipboard sync still doesn't work.
* Everything else is as it was before the reboot.

This is all with the clean install of Parallels 4.0.3846 on an up-to-date OSX 10.6.1.
 
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