If anybody out there has PD8 and a BootCamp VM with Windows 8 and is contemplating upgrading it to Windows 8.1 I wanted to share my experiences with you: It is not possible to upgrade the VM to Windows 8.1 within PD8 because the host OS blocks access to the disk as a security measure. It is possible to upgrade BootCamp to Windows 8.1 by booting the machine from the BootCamp partition and installing the Windows 8.1 update. Reactivation of Windows 8.1 will be required afterwards. After going through this process, PD8 will not offer a way to start the BootCamp VM that has Windows 8.1 At this point I downloaded PD9 in Trial Mode. PD9 was able to start the BootCamp VM that had Windows 8.1 Reactivation of Windows 8.1 was again required. Parallels Tools were updated automatically. Now my Windows 8.1 BootCamp VM is running properly in PD9 Trial Mode. The short summary is that if you are running PD8 and a BootCamp VM with Windows 8, you need to get PD9 if you want to upgrade your BootCamp VM to Windows 8.1.
