Parallels Desktop Beta 3106 Doesn't work with my Partition Scheme

[esquilo22]

Hi,

I never being able to run Parallels Desktop with my Partition Scheme. On the last revision I was able to boot the virtual machine but received a message on a DOS screen complaining about my hardware. Now I receive the message "Unable to open Disk Image using Boot Camp".

I did the following in my Macbook Pro C2D:

* Booted with the Tiger Install DVD and opened Terminal at the first screen
* Created 4 partitions with the following command

diskutil partitionDisk disk0 4 GPTFormat JHFS+ Data 70G JHFS+ Leopard 14G MSDOS Windows 14G JHFS+ Tiger 14G

By doing so I created 5 partitions on my disk:

* disk0s1 - EFI
* disk0s2 - DATA
* disk0s3 - LEOPARD
* disk0s4 - WINDOWS
* disk0s5 - TIGER

That's fine as bootcamp expects WINDOWS to be the last partition on the MBR.

* Installed Tiger with Parallels Desktop

* Installed Windows with a custom XP disk I created with Bootcamp drivers slipstreamed

* Started Parallels Desktop and created a new Virtual Machine. I was allowed to select the Bootcamp option

I've checked everything using diskutil, fdisk and gpt Unix tools and both GPT Table and MBR Table are correct and syncronized. I did the same check using window FDISK and I can see the same info regarding my partition scheme.

Last but not least I'm formating my Windows partition with NTFS during the installation process.

So the question is? Why Parallels Desktop doesn't recognize this configuration? I know a lot of people out there running similar configurations (Linux instead of Leopard for example) and I would like to ask the development team support for disks with more than 2 partitions.

Regards

 

[collinong]

You should be asking for the option to manually pick the volume or partition you want the VM to boot from. That would solve your problem as well as many others with various other types of configs.

See this thread:
http://forum.parallels.com/thread6135.html

 

[esquilo22]

It doesn't work. The point is: In the VM configuration file there is no info regarding what partition you would like to use. Just bootcamp.

I did the following test. I've reformated my Leopard partition (disk0s3) as MS-DOS and it worked. Parallels was able to find a "valid" hard disk.

That's the way bootcamp format your HD:

disk0s1 - EFI
disk0s2 - JHFS+ Tiger
disk0s3 - MS-DOS Windows

So I'm quite sure that disk0s3 is hard coded into Parallels and whenever it has the option bootcamp in the config file it looks for disks03.

COME ON DEVELOPERS! Let us choose which partititon we would like to boot from. We need freedom with this option.

That's a no go for me until I have a version that gives this option to me. It could be a advanced tab, for example