Parallels Desktop V3.0 serious bug: Please read

S

supriyo

Junior Member
Hello everybody,
I have encountered a serious problem with Parallels v3, which is much more serious, more serious than running 3D games or detecting USB devices. I put the macbook pro to sleep with windows XP running on Parallels. I have done it many time before in v2.5 without a single issue. This time, when I woke the computer from sleep, Parallels froze and after a few minutes the entire computer froze. I kept it running the entire night and even in the morning it was frozen. So I had to hard restart the machine. After restarting when I started Windows, to my astonishment, whatever modifications I had done to the virtual HD in the last session was gone!! This includes all programs installed, any files created or modified. the hard disk was back to the state it was in before the last restart.

This is has occured twice to me, so the problem is reproducible. After it occured for the first time, I uninstalled Parallels following the instructions in this forum and reinstalled everything, but the problem repeated. So I would warn everyone to backup their data as frequently as possible, because with this new version, there is no guarantee with data security.

I don't know if this problem has to do something with the snapshot feature?? Why did Parallels release a software that is supposed to be in an early beta stage. Above all, why shouldn't we be able to revert back to the previous stable version (hard drive format changed in the new version).

I had to cancel my seminar in my workplace because i lost my work (the PowerPoint presentation).
 
Is this a known issue? Will it be taken care of in future updates? I have used Parallels for more than a year now and has never let me down until now.
 
Is there a solution for this issue, I am having to restart my laptop each time I come out of sleep mode!

Version 3 has been nothing but trouble so far :mad:
 
My MacBook Pro also froze up with 3.0 running when the computer went to sleep. I had experienced the same thing a few times with earlier versions, so I was careful to never keep parallels desktop running if I were going to be away from the laptop for it to go to sleep. This time I forgot and got a locked up system as a reward.
 
What is working for me is this:

1) BEFORE you suspend your laptop, suspend your VM in Parallels
2) Quit Parallels completely
3) Now suspend your laptop...

"Most" of the time this works just fine. Once in a while MacOS will get messed up and will have trouble and freeze. But it should get you around your problem.

Also if you are putting "important" work in your VM... Something you need for a seminar... I STRONGLY suggest you:

a) Suspend or shutdown your VM
b) Copy/backup the VM to an external drive (or if you have enough space, a copy local)

Do this when you have significant changes that you don't want to lose. It has saved my butt more times than I can count!!!
 
I have had 5060 crash my MB on wake when I left the VM running - the backlight wouldn't even come back on the LCD, although I could see that there was something on the display. The fans went nuts, indicating CPU hogging (presumably from PD).

I haven't had PD crash on wake if I pause it before sleeping. I don't know if that means that pausing prevents it, since it only crashed on me once.

My solution for working with an unstable VM is to put all my work in a shared OSX folder - that way, it's always accessible, and even if the VM crashes and burns, your work isn't stored there, it's stored in a normal mac folder, and it's only being accessed temporarily every time the VM needs to access a file. I've never lost any files or work this way, and I have done a lot of work, even with "unstable" builds of PD.
 
Simple solution

Go back to 2.5. I never had problems until running version 3. Had to reinstall Windows... twice, due to a reproducible bug where the boot.ini file would be saved with the Parallels startup configuration if Parallels crashed. I tried the suggested 'fix' of booting into Parallels and doing a clean shut down, but to no avail. I now only had a modified copy of of the boot.ini instructing windows to boot to Parallels--even if I rebooted the machine directly into windows (I run a partitioned bootcamp environment). Tried numerous fixes, but since OS X can't write files in NTFS (and I could never get any filesystem programs that supposedly allow you to write to NTFS files from OSX to work) I couldn't modify the boot.ini back to a 'good' file, so the machine would boot into Parallels fine but lock up when booting into the bootcamp partition. This, other bugs, the complete lack of real game "runability", and (since I'm using bootcamp) the inability to perform 'rollbacks' made 3 completely unworkable. I went back to 2.5 and have been bug-free since--even with my MacBook Pro locking up once (corrupted SMC) while Parallels was running. Booting into windows after this crash was no problem.

Just go back to 2.5. You'll be much happier.
 
same problem in 2.5...

I would like to add that i have these problems in Parallels 2.5. See separate post. I feel this is completely unacceptable for commercial software of this caliber. It seems this problem has happened to a few people and no answer or solution to this date.

To have to shut down the vm and back up the vm every time I put the macbook pro to sleep sounds downright ridiculous. Maybe Parallels should do on a constant backup so that at least it would roll back to a more recent state if this happens.
 
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