Parallels Tools install won't start

I've recently reinstalled Parallels for Mac. I'm attempting to access a working Boot Camp partition. The image starts up fine under Parallels, but when I try to install Parallels Tools nothing happens. It looks like some disk activity happens but no install screen comes up.

I tried moving the Program Files/CommonFiles/InstallShield directory because of some advice in the Knowledge Base. (First I tried moving the 10 directory, and then the parent.)

I'm obviously looking to fix the issue, but I'd settle for some better way to debug the problem. Is there a log file I can look for? I'm not seeing anything host side log or in the activity log of Windows. Is there a way I can run the setup.exe directly?

Here is the versions involved:
Host:
Leopard 10.5.1 latest security patches applied
Parallels Build 5582
MacBook Pro 2.0 GHz
2GB physical memory

VM:
Boot Camp partition
1GB virtual memory
most everything at default. CDROM _is_ enabled

Guest:
Windows XP Pro SP2 . Latest patches applied
Parallels tools were installed previously, but I believe they were uninstalled successfully. Probably 2 was 2.x upgrade to 3.0 beta

Any thoughts? Suggestions? Questions?

Thanks in advance,

David

 

do you have the cd-rom mounted as an image (-driver) or does it use the actual cd-rom in the mac? What happens is when you run parallels tools, it mounts an image on your cd-rom drive (temporarily) and runs that as a cd. Can imagine that if the cd-rom is (already) referring to a different image it will have trouble overwriting that one.

Can you check and make sure?

Let us know if that changes anything...

 

[Resolved] Possible KB suggestion?

So, I did realize that the tools installer used the cdrom drive, which is why I mentioned that I did have it enabled. And I did have it set at "default" rather than a specific image.

But thomasj's post got me thinking along the lines that eventually solved the problem. I wondered that since the installer was never finishing maybe I could "catch" the installer on the CDROM drive. And sure enough, once I used the menu option to start the installer all of the installation files appeared on the CDROM drive of the guest OS. All I had to do was double click the installer and everything worked fine.

Which got me thinking even more. I wondered how Parallels is actually trying to launch the installer. And then I realized that it probably wasn't trying to launch the installer: it didn't really have any way to launch the the installer since the Tools weren't installed yet. Parallels probably just mounts the virtual CD and waits for Windows to autostart it. And I have autostart turned off in the guest OS. I didn't verify that this was the problem by turning autostart back on, but this fits all of the symptoms. No wonder there was no log entries: Parallels wasn't actually doing anything.

I know I'm in the minority by having autostart off, but this probably merits something in the instructions or as a KB article. (Hopefully it isn't in there already and I just missed it.)

Thanks ThomasJ.

David