Parallels Desktop 15 hanging during startup after Windows 10 issue

F

FrankO1

Member
Today I was running Windows 10 in Parallels Desktop 15 for Mac. After attempting to access an unusually large directory, Windows hung for an unusually long time. The only way I found to exit was to use macOS's Force Quit on Parallels.

After rebooting the Mac, I now find that Parallels Desktop hangs when I attempt to start it. What's the best course of action next?
 
Some additional information for my question:

If I try to launch Parallels Desktop, a box appears that reads:

Parallels Desktop
Starting ...

But nothing further happens after many minutes. The MacBook's fan starts fairly soon after attempting to launch it.

If I move the "Windows 10.pvm" file out of its normal directory, Parallels Desktop appears to start normally, showing the menu of pvm's.

Is there anything I can do in or to Parallels to try to fix this? If it seems to indicate that the Windows 10.pvm file is damaged, I have a backup but it would be greatly preferable to rescue the version now on the Mac. Is there anything I can do with the pvm file to try to resolve any issues?
 
FrankO1 said:
Some additional information for my question:
If I try to launch Parallels Desktop, a box appears that reads:
Parallels Desktop
Starting ...
But nothing further happens after many minutes. The MacBook's fan starts fairly soon after attempting to launch it.
If I move the "Windows 10.pvm" file out of its normal directory, Parallels Desktop appears to start normally, showing the menu of pvm's.
Is there anything I can do in or to Parallels to try to fix this? If it seems to indicate that the Windows 10.pvm file is damaged, I have a backup but it would be greatly preferable to rescue the version now on the Mac. Is there anything I can do with the pvm file to try to resolve any issues?
Click to expand...
Hi, could you please reproduce the issue, collect the tech report and post the report's ID here?
 
Maria, thank you for the message.

While I was waiting for your response, I did the following:

1) Removed Parallels Desktop.app from the Mac's Applications folder.

2) Reinstalled Parallels Desktop 15 from an installer downloaded from parallels.com.

3) Went to the Mac's /Users/[username]/Parallels folder, and double-clicked on Windows 10.pvm.

Parallels then started, and began to open Windows 10. A message appeared stating that it had not been shut down properly, so it spent quite a while checking files.

Eventually, a new VM was created in the Parallels menu, "Windows 10 (1)". It appeared to contain the prior contents of my Windows system, but was not organized the same way (the desktop looked very different, etc).

I therefore closed "Windows 10 (1)" and, in the Parallels menu, double-clicked on the icon for the original Windows 10 VM.

After a lengthy startup period, this appeared to launch correctly. All of the desktop contents appear to be the same that they were previously.

Now I see in the /Users/[username]/Parallels folder, there is a Windows 10.pvm and also a Windows 10 (1).pvm, both are quite large (~100 GB).

So here is my question now. Since the original Windows 10 VM appears to be working, is it safe for me to delete the Windows 10 (1) VM?
 
@FrankO1 , looks like that your Windows 10 (1) is a copy (not a full copy) of your original VM.
You can remove it and use your Windows 10 VM.
Also please do not forget to update your Parallels Desktop to the latest build (15.1.0)
 
For anyone coming to this thread with similar issues, I wanted to share my solution. I've been having similar problems with Parallels on my MacBook Pro for about a year now. Mac OS continues to perform as fast as the day it was purchased until I open Parallels and try to start my Windows 10 VM. For most of 2020, this process caused my entire machine to hang for 20 to 60 minutes and then once the OS started responding again I would have intermittent freezes throughout the day. Very frustrating as you can imagine...well over the past two weeks things seemed to have gotten much worse where at one point MacOS with my Win10 VM running completely froze for longer than 6 hours and I had to hard shutdown the laptop and power up again to get things working. In a first attempt to resolve this issue I added 10 gb of disk space to my VM (it had less than 5gb free) and I installed this update from Microsoft: "Feature update to Windows 10, version 20H2". Once I did this things went completely down hill and I was unable to open Parallels Control center at all with the app freezing on the "Starting" splash screen.

Thankfully I'm quite diligent about backing up to an external drive with Time Machine so my next steps were as follows:
  1. Copied the current version of my VHD to external drive so that I didn't accidentally lose any data.
  2. Deleted the VHD from my /users/%profile%/Parallels folder. **Removing this 70gb file from my machine immediately improved performance on the mac.
  3. Not sure what inspired me to do this, but I then ran Apple's "First Aid" tool on my "Data" drive. After doing so, my machine's performance improved dramatically!
  4. I then attached my external drive, opened Time Machine and copied the latest Pre-Windows Update VHD back to my /users/%profile%/Parallels directory.
***Now, EVERYTHING is running as if the laptop were 1 day old. Windows 10 VM in Parallels loads in less than 60 seconds and I am not seeing my machine hang at all. Ran all of the latest Windows Critical and Feature updates and everything is still running smoothly as of today.

I hope this is helpful to anyone else searching the interwebs for a solution to this issue.

My specs: Spring 2015 MBP, 256 gb SSD, 16 gb ram running Mac OS Catalina and Parallels 15

FrankO1 said:
Some additional information for my question:

If I try to launch Parallels Desktop, a box appears that reads:

Parallels Desktop
Starting ...

But nothing further happens after many minutes. The MacBook's fan starts fairly soon after attempting to launch it.

If I move the "Windows 10.pvm" file out of its normal directory, Parallels Desktop appears to start normally, showing the menu of pvm's.

Is there anything I can do in or to Parallels to try to fix this? If it seems to indicate that the Windows 10.pvm file is damaged, I have a backup but it would be greatly preferable to rescue the version now on the Mac. Is there anything I can do with the pvm file to try to resolve any issues?
Click to expand...
 
JeffB32 said:
For anyone coming to this thread with similar issues, I wanted to share my solution. I've been having similar problems with Parallels on my MacBook Pro for about a year now. Mac OS continues to perform as fast as the day it was purchased until I open Parallels and try to start my Windows 10 VM. For most of 2020, this process caused my entire machine to hang for 20 to 60 minutes and then once the OS started responding again I would have intermittent freezes throughout the day. Very frustrating as you can imagine...well over the past two weeks things seemed to have gotten much worse where at one point MacOS with my Win10 VM running completely froze for longer than 6 hours and I had to hard shutdown the laptop and power up again to get things working. In a first attempt to resolve this issue I added 10 gb of disk space to my VM (it had less than 5gb free) and I installed this update from Microsoft: "Feature update to Windows 10, version 20H2". Once I did this things went completely down hill and I was unable to open Parallels Control center at all with the app freezing on the "Starting" splash screen.

Thankfully I'm quite diligent about backing up to an external drive with Time Machine so my next steps were as follows:
  1. Copied the current version of my VHD to external drive so that I didn't accidentally lose any data.
  2. Deleted the VHD from my /users/%profile%/Parallels folder. **Removing this 70gb file from my machine immediately improved performance on the mac.
  3. Not sure what inspired me to do this, but I then ran Apple's "First Aid" tool on my "Data" drive. After doing so, my machine's performance improved dramatically!
  4. I then attached my external drive, opened Time Machine and copied the latest Pre-Windows Update VHD back to my /users/%profile%/Parallels directory.
***Now, EVERYTHING is running as if the laptop were 1 day old. Windows 10 VM in Parallels loads in less than 60 seconds and I am not seeing my machine hang at all. Ran all of the latest Windows Critical and Feature updates and everything is still running smoothly as of today.

I hope this is helpful to anyone else searching the interwebs for a solution to this issue.

My specs: Spring 2015 MBP, 256 gb SSD, 16 gb ram running Mac OS Catalina and Parallels 15
Click to expand...
Thank you for this. It was very helpful. I was curious if you knew whether or not Time Machine works when the virtual machine is running. I ask because when I opened Time Machine yesterday to restore the .pvm file, I was surprised to see that the most recent was Dec 6, rather than Dec 22.
Thanks in advance for any info you might have, and thanks again for posting your results.
 
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