Problem Starting VM After moving Files

I'm having a problem getting my VM to start, or rather be a valid VM after moving my files to another drive and back. I moved the entire directory, in my case called winxp.pvm and then copied them back. Neither the location I moved them to or the location I copied them back to will work. I get a message that:

The Virtual Machine is not available.
The virtual machine's files have been moved or deleted. If the files are on an external device, reconnect the device. You can also remove the virtual machine from the list or manually locate it's files.

The VM was in a suspended state when I did this but parallels was shutdown. Here is my file and directory structure:

total 0
drwx------@ 5 xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx 170 Dec 29 16:31 winxp.pvm

Parallels/winxp.pvm:
total 0
drwx------@ 6 xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx 204 Dec 30 17:23 winxp.hdd
drwx------ 21 xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx 714 Dec 29 16:31 Windows Applications
drwx------ 3 xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx 102 Dec 26 09:13 Windows Disks

Parallels/winxp.pvm/winxp.hdd:
total 16315968
-rw-r--r-- 1 xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx 0 Dec 30 17:23 winxp.hdd
-rwx------ 1 xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx 1185 Dec 28 17:05 DiskDescriptor.xml
-rw------- 1 xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx 1185 Dec 28 17:05 DiskDescriptor.xml.Temp
-rwx------ 1 xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx 8353763840 Dec 28 17:04 winxp.hdd.0.{5fbaabe3-6958-40ff-92a7-860e329aab41}.hds

There is a bunch of stuff under windows applications too but I didn't want to spam this post with it.

Any hope of recovering this VM or am I hosed?

 

Remove missed VM, and just double click winxp.pvm

 

Hmm, I'm not sure if I understood this correctly or not. What I did was remove the VM from the list so parallels thought I did not have any VM's on this machine. Then I browsed to winxp.pvm and double clicked on it, but no change. I just get the following pop-up:

The specified bundle is invalid.
The bundle does not contain a valid Parallels virtual machine.

 

config.pvs is missed inside,
In this case you need to create new VM, and add existing hdd from inside bundle winxp.hdd

 

Cool, that did the trick. Thanks for your help.

 

I have am having the same problem with Parallels 4 but did not have this problem with Parallels 3.

I created a virtual machine on machine1, moved the .pvm file to an external drive, and removed the original (to save space). Later, I copied the .pvm file back to its original location on machine1. When I double-click on the pvm file, the error that I get is:

The virtual machine is not available. The virtual machine's files have been moved or deleted. ...

What can I do to ensure that you can 'archive' a virtual machine and use it again later? Recreating the virtual machine with another disk does not do what I want; I end up with two virtual machines - one that cannot load and another that has a hard-drive that points to the first. This solution does not scale well.

Thanks.

 

check config.pvs files size inside VM, what is the size?

 

config.pvs is 10251 bytes. Here is a complete listing:

drwxr-xr-x@ 9 thomas thomas 306 Jan 12 10:35 ./
drwxr-xr-x@ 10 thomas thomas 340 Jan 12 09:13 ../
-rwxr--r--@ 1 thomas thomas 121 Jan 9 14:25 Snapshots.xml*
drwxrwxrwx 10 thomas thomas 340 Jan 9 16:13 Windows Applications/
drwxr-xr-x 3 thomas thomas 102 Jan 9 16:55 Windows Disks/
-rwxr--r--@ 1 thomas thomas 10251 Jan 12 10:49 config.pvs*
-rwxr--r--@ 1 thomas thomas 10251 Jan 12 10:49 config.pvs.backup*
-rwxrw-rw-@ 1 thomas thomas 146052 Jan 9 17:35 parallels.log*
drwxr-xr-x@ 6 thomas thomas 204 Jan 12 10:35 winxp.hdd/

 

"config.pvs is missed inside,
In this case you need to create new VM, and add existing hdd from inside bundle winxp.hdd"

How is this done? I've created a new VM but now what? Help please...

 

After doing a diff between the config.pvs from a working VM and the one I was having trouble with, I noticed that the <Parallel> section was included only in the VM that would not load. I removed it manually and the VM started up.

I had not made any manual changes to the config.pvs file until just now, so I am curious why this change was necessary. Where is the parallel1.txt file (referenced by the apparently invalid <Parallel> section) actually located? Is there a Parallels configuration option to remove it? I would still like to understand what happened.

Thanks.

 

There is no such options, and in such situation the best way is to use existing hdd for new VM
or copy config.backup.pvs to config.pvs in many cases it will work

virtualJ
If you create new VM , click Configure and navigate to folder where pvm is located , click pvw, click hdd, inside, click Add

 

John,

I moved my pvm to my shared folder so I can access my wife's XP VM. I don't see a configure option. I select open, and then navigate to the recently moved pvm, and select it and it seems to be OK. Then as windows boots up, it says non-system disk or disk error. Can you take me through the steps again for Parallels 6 for Mac? Thanks.

 

Window -> Virtual Machine List.

Then right click the virtual machine and select Configure.

If the virtual machine window is in front, then you can go to Virtual Machine menu -> Configure or you can click the Configure button near the bottom right of the virtual machine window.

It's not necessary to move your VM to access your wife's VM. VM's do not need to be all located in the same spot to be usable. The VM does need to have correct permissions though. If your wife's VM was created in /Users/Shared/Parallels then it probably has read/write permission for everyone. If your VM was created in ~/Documents/Parallels then it probably only has read/write permission for yourself.

 

>>> Message has been deleted by the user <<<

 

I followed this "Remove missed VM, and just double click winxp.pvm" and it work with me.

 

Urgent help needed!

Hi - I wonder if someone could please help me. I have spent all weekend on this forum trying different things but to no avail. Somehow the whole parallels program ended up being moved into a dropbox storage file! I moved it out again but now parallels is not working at all!
WHen I try to open the VM I get the message saying the specific bundle is invalid - The bundle does not contain a valid parallels virtual machine. I have tried to create a new VM but cannot find the existing .hdd files to move back in so I can access the original files (which are very important and I need back!). To top it all off time machine seems to have failed so I cannot even use this!!!! I am pulling my hair out with this and in desperate need of help!
As a last resort I tried re-installing Windows 7 onto the new VM but it now opens up parallels but says it cannot connect to hard disk 1. I need it to run windows 7 as this was where the existing files were stored.
Unfortunately I am not very technically minded and have no idea what I am doing - any help would be appreciated but in laymen terms please
Thanks
L.

 

@Laura
Your situation is particularly tricky, there are a lot of 'ifs'. I can tell tell you for sure that if you can't find that .hdd file either in your computer or in dropbox there's really no way to retrieve the lost/misplaced data.
Your virtual machine is something that has the .pvm extension, this is called a bundle because it's actually a folder, inside this folder there's another bundle called .hdd, and this bundle is supposed to have a rather big file (many GBs) which is the virtual disk.

If you can't find this .hdd, or if this .hdd doesn't have a rather big file inside (the virtual disk) it's impossible get your data back. It's also not easy to help you from a distance, do you have a more tech savvy friend that can help you look up for that file?

 

Hi - thank you for trying to help. The file which was moved back from dropbox (parallels icon on desktop) appears to be over 25GB in size - I am assuming this is the virtual disk you mentioned previously? Problem is when I try to open it the following message appears:
The specified bundle is invalid.

The bundle does not contain a valid Parallels virtual machine.

Any idea how I can access the files inside - as I said I have already created a new VM but no idea how to transfer the files obviously included in this large file over?????

Thanks again.

 

Screenshots of everything, the files/bundle in Finder and the error messages.

 

Thank you.
As I said I am not very technical and could not get my screen shots to paste onto this post! I have attached them as
files below. The first one at 13h57 is the error message opening the parallels icon which says is 25gb. The second one
appears when I try to open the 1st parallels icon on the desktop (no idea where that appeared from but it appeared after
the files were taken out of dropbox again) this file is 1.34GB. The 3rd screenshot at 14h10 is the message which appears if you click OK on the previous message.
The 4th screen shot is of Finder - I cannot see any files in here

On the desk top the Parallels icon called Windows 7 new is the new VM I made - I tried to reinstall windows 7 on here but this doesn't seem to work either. But obviously this will not help recover the existing files anyway.

I hope this makes sense - sorry. If there is an easier way of accessing the screen shots please let me know.

Thanks

L.