Parallels with Boot Camp

[Harman]

I'm attempting to use parallels with a Boot Camp partition and having issues when it starts up. specifically I get the error message "Parallels Desktop cannot find necessary drivers to configure your Boot Camp partition. Please refer to Help> Parallels Desktop Help> Using Boot Camp Windows XP Installation for troubleshooting."

I went into the help, but it was useless and doesn't give me anything to go on. It's not a box version of XP. It's a "stripped" version but installs and runs better as far as I'm concerned. The Mac is a 2/2x512/80 MacBook. The partition is 10gb. And OS X is also ver clean, I got the computer yesterday. I'm using 3106 on a trial key.

I have booted into XP since installing Parallels just can't get it to work as a virtual machine. I'd love to try coherence mode and possibly avoid buying new Office software.

Any help is much appreciated.

 

[ClunkClunk]

I had the error that stated:

Parallels Desktop cannot find necessary drivers to configure your Boot Camp partition. Please refer to Help> Parallels Desktop Help> Using Boot Camp Windows XP Installation for troubleshooting.

In the Parallels User Guide it has some info about this error:

1 Boot into Windows XP via Boot Camp
2 Insert Microsoft Windows XP installation disc which was used for this Windows XP
installation.
3 Locate the folder i368 on the disc and open it. Copy the following files: driver.cab
and any of spN.cab files (sp1.cab or sp2.cab, etc depending on service package
installed) to the folder: C:\WIndows\Driver Cache\i386.

When I did this, I had driver.cab on my XP disc, but I did not have sp1.cab or sp2.cab. If I copied driver.cab and tried Parallels, I got the same error. I fixed it by locating another copy of an XP install disc, and digging in the disc to find the sp2.cab file, dropping it in to the i386 folder, and trying Parallels. After I did that, Parallels Desktop functioned exactly how it should with my Boot Camp partition. I'm not too sure why my disc doesn't have that file. It's an XP Pro Corporate Edition, SP2.

Either way, my successful steps were these:
1. Boot directly to XP via Boot Camp
2. Copy sp2.cab from XP disc (or download it perhaps) to C:/windows/driver cache/i386
3. Reboot back to Mac OS X
4. Set up Parallels Desktop to use Boot Camp