Parallels Desktop for Mac build 3120 RC1 is available for download.

Bluescreens Endless Loop

I just installed 3120 (RC1) over the last Beta 3 and I'm still getting blue screens as soon as I try to boot into my Boot Camp XP partition with Parallels. As soon as the Parallels overlay comes up and it gets past selecting the "Parallels configuration" profile, I get a blue screen. Windows reboots and the same thing happens over and over.

Any ideas?

 

Music skips when opening any OS X app

Ever since updating to the Release Candidate, I've noticed that any music I'm playing in Windows Media Player or Napster skips when I launch another OS X application. I don't remember this being a problem with previous betas. Is there a way to fix this?

Also, (I haven't tested this with the RC) if I leave the VM running overnight, it seems to take up more than a gig of my 2 gigs of available ram and eventually crashes (on a Macbook 2 GHz Core Duo).

Keep up the great work, I just hope these issues get fixed before the final release!

 

Open the task manager in Windows and take some notes about resource usage, and also with the OS X system monitor - I'm personally interested in the Windows demands vs the Parallels demands on resources. I can't prove it yet because there's not enough empirical data, but my own tests show the resource hog is Windows, not Parallels. Parallels has to provide for the needs of Windows so it would be easy to blame it, but it might just be doing it's job. Arriving at a good operational apportionment of resources might require finessing the parallels vm parameters.

 

Installed the RC1 overtop of beta 3.

It did the tools upgrade fine, and I rebooted again.

Anyone know how to disable the Parallels overlay screen - the one that says upon bootup, it will install the parallels tools? This is more of an optical nuissance than anything else. It does go away after the GUI loads.

Might this be a switch in the boot.ini file?

 

Tim:

Do you think it would be possible to explain what Parallels Boot Camp tools did when it was installed? It seems that many people here on the forums cannot reverse what the tools did, so our BootCamp installations are not working. Currently only my Parallels works with my Boot Camp partition, but when I try to boot directly to Boot Camp I get a BSOD which is most likely because it can't find the neccessary drivers to load up and I guess it's trying to load the Parallels drivers instead of the regular ones.

Thanks.

 

Unfotunately coherence is still broken on this release. It has been broken for many of us since beta 1, and I think we go back again to earlier release. Hopefully you are working on a fix. All of our posts regarding this was met with people with posts of others that their is working, and of course no support from parallel.
Well it is great for these people that it is working for you, and we do believe it is working for you. For us who it is not working we have tried everything, and nothing works. Hope we get a resolution soon on this.

Mark

 

ok... Again Vista and Bootcamp

So I've posted like 5 times in different forums (every time a new candidate is released) and have mentioned issues with BootCamp and Vista - I can't seem to find anything that says this isn't going to work- and from the bootcamp side of things everything is good.

NTFS - VISTA bootcamp partition single drive macbook pro.

I have yet to succesffully get past any startup screen - I can't get even thru the bios with the RC1 release. I get a non-specific error - unable to open bootcamp etc...

Any help would be much appreciated - or at least tell me that vista doesn't work....

 

All replies under one message?

My wish for this forum: make the announcement posts read only, and have people post their replies in different threads. That way we don't have 7 different conversations doing on in the same thread.

Not a huge deal, but a wish.

TjL

 

I think the collective wisdom regarding Boot Camp and Parallels integration is don't do it yet. It has shown a significant failure rate and the consequences have been dire. Personally I don't need it and don't care about it, so I could be seen as less than objective, but beyond that, anything that is so catastrophic when it fails is in my world a failure. I don't suggest it will always be a failure, but it has sufficiently failed to date that it just doesn't show up on my radar as an option to fuss with. I suppose a good rule of thumb is, examine it, try it, experiment with it, but don't yet trust it. And hell, it might work for you if not for me.

This I think will be corrected at some point, but it is failing in the user space at such a rate that one just has to say whoa!, this isn't for me. It's a decision we each have to make. My faith with the Parallels team remains strong but guarded - realistically I have to think of me and my equipment as a business decision.

There is a tremendous amount of discovery that goes into a project like this. The answers are not obvious because the original designers weren't expecting the questions. Who knew OS X would some day host guest OS's? Who of those guest OS programmers knew their OS would be a guest on an emulated platform? In this envrionment of not knowing, what shortcuts if any were taken to get the product to market? It is not to be known but to be wondered over. For programmers it is the greatest of challenges.

The result has been to ask those questions and to puzzle over the lack of hard data needed to pull this together. That is going on daily and solutions are being found and implemented also daily. Because of that I have no doubt the P team is going to find the solutions, the buried short cuts, the hacks, the work-arounds, and the end result will be the Parallels we all want.

I'm looking forward to the first birthday of Parallels and reflecting on the progress they've made in that short year. Yes, it's been less than one year! It's been a brief period of imperfection but it has a record of pursuing perfection tenaciously. I have faith.

 

I've had some ideas in that regard. My partner drval can probably expand on them better than I could as I tend to belabor the point. My good friend Don can also provide some insight into a more helpful structure in these groups. One geared for making the most information available to the largest possible audience. Take it away, gentlemen - we are your audience.

 

I totally agree with you: I have always connected an external disk for my backup (via sync) with a FAT32 partition. It is not acceptable for me to disconnect it when I wan't to run Win XP Bootcamp in Parallels. Aside this I see no technical reason for the problem (the BootCamp partition should have a unique and distinct device name!?).

 

No - it is some kind of unknown bug. Could you describe test case in more details please?

 

Using the last beta I got a really bad memory leak that would crash the VM after about 20 minutes or so. The entire Mac would become VERY slow right before this would happen.

This version seems to have gotten rid of the issue. Memory is holding fairly steady between 790 and 794 MB's of usage.

I had been about to go back to the release version of Parrallels despite the fact it would mean giving up the coherence features for awhile. Glad I don't have to anymore.

Is iSight support something planned for the final release? That would be very cool for those IM apps that don't support video chat on OS X.

Jamie

 

Thanks for report! We reproduced it and working on it already.

Yes.

 

is the .mem normal if it starts so quick as before?

ore should there be no .mem file?

 

coherence mode and multiple displays is not working for me.

the applications are always "out of the screen" if i change to the coherence mode.

is there a manually fix available?

 

I only have a .mem file whenever the VM is running or suspended. When running it is always twice the size of the RAM allocated to the VM (currently 1.46Gb for a 768Mb VM) and when I suspend it, it drops to 768Mb as I'd expect if this is the suspended memory state.

If I turn the VM off correctly then the .mem file is removed.

Is this not correct behaviour? See this under both 3106 and 3120.

Cheers

Russell

 

My reason for disabling this and preferring the drag/drop method from 3106 would be I don't trust my windows partition not to get a virus (I do run virus and firewall). The files on it aren't as important as the files on the OS X partition and I don't want a program have write access to my entire OS X hard-drive. I mount 1 folder as read/write which is just for transferring files (before drag/drop appeared) and the entire hard-drive I mount as read-only so windows can't write to it.

Maybe I'm paranoid but ...

Cheers

Russell

 

I cannot start WindowsXP from bootcamp

Even this release was not able to start from bootcamp.

I use MacPro.
I installed two HDDs in MacPro.
I installed OSX in the first HDD.
I installed WindowsXP in the second HDD with bootcamp.

I want to start WindowsXP by Parallels from the second HDD.
I choose "Use Boot Camp", but fail when I start WindowsXP.

The following error message is displayed.

"More than one Windows partitions are found. The current version of Parallels Desktop doesnÕt support such configuration and can not continue."

Is this a known problem?

From Japan

 

It does not compare to my experience here. Startup times have NOT increased, but I pamper the VM virtual HD once every two weeks (defrag in the VM itself and Defrag at the host level using the image tool.

When the VM starts, immediately, even before windows itself boots, the .mem file is at around 1.5 GB. That file is clearly NOT filled at startup. I think space is reserved / allocated but no write (up to the max size at least) happen immediately. It looks much like a private virtual memory mapped file.

I really think you should try to look somewhere else for the slowdown of the startup.