Parallels 4 issues - multiple

I've been having a number of issues with Parallels 4 since upgrading about a month and a half ago. Hopefully someone can point me toward some solutions.

1. On boot, I receive a "new device detected" on the Parallels Paravirtualization Driver. The OS cannot find the driver for it and complains. However, after canceling out of all the windows that Windows pops up, it seems to finally find the driver since it doesn't have any errors in the system device panel. This doesn't seem like it is normal.

The bottom bar of Parallels states "Parallels Tools are not installed. From the Virtual Machine menu, choose install Parallel Tools." The only problem is that Parallels Tools are installed. I've tried uninstalling them and reinstalling them with no luck getting rid of the message or fixing the driver problem.

2. Drag-and-drop transfers between the Mac and Windows are extremely slow, sometimes taking a couple minutes to move a single small file. Opening the .psf "network" links are equally slow. This is intermittent, but seems to be occurring more and more frequently. Accessing \\IP.address works fine by comparison.

3. Every time I reboot my Mac, I have to relink the HDD in the Parallels config or I get the fairly common issue with bootcamp HDD drives where Parallels cannot open the HDD.

None of these problems occurred with Parallels 3.

I'm running a Mac Pro (2008) with 10GBs memory. I have 3 internal HDDs (1 boot camp, 2 mac), an external Time Machine drive. Additionally this system has three ODDs, two internally and one external (USB).

I'm currently running 10.5.5 (have not rebooted since 10.5.6 came out yet). The guest OS is Windows XP SP3.

Let me know if you need any info.

--

And now a general gripe: There needs to be a way to scan directories and update the Windows Helper Apps in them to new versions of the app and different Virtual Machine IDs. Very annoying when you change something and all your windows app links break.

 

It looks that VM were not upgraded properly
As for issue about applications, When VM is running, run Applications - Windows - Populate

 

Well, I did have an issue during the upgrade that interrupted it: blue screen on boot (http://kb.parallels.com/en/5447) but I fixed that and Parallels seemed to finish the upgrade after that, though it took some prodding.

Any ideas how to fix the problems?

Thanks.

 

Try following:
1. Start Window in safe mode and delete files starting with prl* from c:\Windows\System32\drivers
2. Upgrade Windows while in Boot Camp to the latest Windows patches
3. In Parallels reinstall Parallels Tools

 

Well, I seem to have fixed problem 1. Haven't been in a case to test problem 2 or 3 yet; 2 might take some time, since that was intermittant. 3 will take time since I only reboot about once every 2 months or so.

Long story on fixing #1:

Upon booting in boot camp something fishy was readily apparent: the Parallels Paravirtualization device was existing there also. So, went forward and deleted the prl* files as you suggested, rebooted into boot camp, and still the Parallels Paravirtualization device was there.

So I did a little digging in system device manager and the registry. The Paravirtualization device was mounted at ROOT\prl_pv32 per the device manager. In the registry, I found four registry keys that should not have been present in boot camp (these may vary by configuration):

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\root#prl_pv32]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Enum\Root\SYSTEM\0003]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet003\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\root#prl_pv32]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet003\Enum\Root\SYSTEM\0003]

The two 0003 items contained:

Backed up these four keys and deleted them (required some key permissions changes to delete them all). They were the only references to the parallels paravirtualization driver file other than the driver reference entries.

Once this was done, rebooted boot camp just to make sure everything still worked. It did. Then installed windows updates while I was in there so I didn't have to come back later.

Upon finishing windows updates, rebooted into Mac and tried to run the existing VM. Same issue with #3. Instead of messing with that VM, I decided to start from scratch, and created a new WinXP VM linked to the boot camp partition.

Booted up, no mouse. Installed parallels tools, rebooted, still no mouse, and still saying that parallels tools wasn't installed (even though I could see it was - same issue as before). However, the paravirtualization driver not found issue was gone.

Plugged in a spare mouse and assigned it to parallels so I could navigate by means other than keyboard. Hunted to device manager and found that the install of parallels tools had failed to readd the drivers that we had deleted way up at the beginning of this endeavor.

Add remove programs -> uninstall parallels tools. Reboot. Install parallels tools. Reboot.

And everything worked. Drivers were back, parallels was reporting that parallels tools was properly installed, had full control over the OS again.

Hopefully this fixes the problems. I'll let you know about #2 and #3 once I've been able to properly test them.

I'm guessing something really got borked during the upgrade from Parallels 3, and knowing the issues I had with Windows during the upgrade, I wouldn't be surprised. For a little history, SP3 had been installed under Parallels 3, rather than rebooting to boot camp. I'd installed it before the problem with SP3 installed under Parallels became known. Thus I wound up having to do a repair install of Windows, which caused lots of headaches with both Parallels and Bootcamp, especially because Parallels was halfway through upgrading the VM from Parallels 3 to Parallels 4 when Windows decided to fail.

Thanks!

--RC

As for populating apps to update the windows helper apps, that works all well and good if you (a) left the files in their default location and just linked to them and (b) didn't add custom icons to them you don't want undone. As I have violated both (a) and (b), populating the apps didn't help much with fixing the application links

 

Still having issues. Every time I reboot, the VM cannot connect to the bootcamp HDD. I keep having to re-add the drive to the machine to fix it. As long as I don't reboot the machine, I can start the VM up without a problem.

Error: "Unable to connect Hard Disk 1. A file or device required for the operation of Hard Disk 1 does not exist or is used by another process, or you have no permission to access it. The virtual machine will continue running, but the device will be disconnected."

Here is something odd I'm pulling out of the /Library/Logs/parallels.log:

However, Draal Data Storage is one of my Mac drives, not my bootcamp drive. Why, after a reboot, is it trying to connect to the wrong drive?

Any ideas?

 

And the saga continues. Rebooted tonight to install something.

Parallels was working fine off disk1s2.

On reboot, Mac rearranged my drive assignments and Parallels doesn't find the drive again:

My Windows boot drive is now disk2s2.

Here are my current HDD and ODD drive mountings:

And here is the physical mount point of each drive in case you are trying to track down why this might be happening:

Any thoughts on how to fix my drive mount points changing every reboot and messing up Parallels?

 

could you create ticket in support, it is very interesting case, and we would like to check situation?

 

Done, ticket #665942.

 

Please reply in ticket