Second Hard Drive Disappeared...

M

Michael Aronis

Junior Member
Hello All,

I installed XP Pro via Parallels on a new iMac. I put it on my primary hard drive (SSD, 256 Gig) but wanted to put a clone on my second iMac Hard drive (2 TB) for my son to play Windows XP based games. I did not want to use up my SSD drive space with games. (Must say XP booting from the SSD is lighting fast LOL).

So... I cloned the VM (XP Pro) and designated a folder on my secondary iMac hard drive, and the Cloned XP OS ran fine. I then changed it's configuration by added a second virtual hard drive via the parallel tools. I then used Windows XP tools to allocate the new virtual hard drive, named it E: and formatted it. I Copied the games folders from my "Mac Environment" to the virtual machines second hard drive and edited my registry to point to the proper locations. I also moved another game folder from my Virtual Machines "C" drive to the "E" drive to bring all the game files to the same virtual hard drive.

With me so far?

So all three games ran fine (well, Mass Effect One does not like running on the virtual machine, but that's another issue), so I shut down that virtual machine (Game XP) and rebooted Work XP.

On Work XP I uninstalled the three games. All was fine.

I rebooted Game XP and my virtual E: Drive was no longer in the My Computer folder! I checked with Windows system tools and the Virtual hard drive shows up as unallocated!

Back in the Mac Environment I looked at the .PVM file with "Show Package Contents" and the .hdd file for the second hard drive is there and shows 15 gigs of content.

So How Do I Recover this Virtual Hard Drive in Parallels without loosing that data?

Thank you,

Mike

(Max OS X Lion, latest version, Parallels Desktop 7, Windows XP Pro SP3 all latest updates, etc)
 

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well, I generated that number, but don't have a record of it. The id on the Parallels support page is the ID for the request for support and not the id generated by the "report problem" program.

Mike
 
What am I missing here? I posted my question to Parallels and I received a follow-up email basically blowing off my question????


"Dear Valued Customer,

We are writing to follow up with you about your issue/question with ticket ID #1268277. We have not heard back from you in the last three days and would like to know if there is anything else that we can do to assist you?

You can review your ticket history or respond to your ticket at https://support.parallels.com. If you forgot your password please click "Forgot my password". If we may close this request, please click on the Resolve button in the ticket or you may Reply to this email and simply enter "RESOLVED" as your response."

Here is the ticket information. If anyone can see a solution in this cryptic message please explain to me?

QUOTE:
Wed Nov 23 10:43:28 2011 RT_System - PD 7 Build '15052' added
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Wed Nov 23 10:43:29 2011 + 1 S RT_System - Country 'United States' added
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Wed Nov 23 10:43:29 2011 + 0 S RT_System - Case Origin 'E-Mail' added
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Wed Nov 23 10:43:29 2011 + 0 S - Customer Michael Aronis () added
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Wed Nov 23 10:43:29 2011 + 0 S - SupportTypeId changed from (no value) to PD Registered
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Wed Nov 23 10:43:29 2011 + 0 S - CreatedByContract changed from (no value) to 'FAKE4EC320755C4666'
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Wed Nov 23 10:43:29 2011 + 0 S - Severity changed from (no value) to Severity Four (Enhancement)
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Wed Nov 23 10:43:30 2011 + 1 S - ETAlastUpdated changed from (no value) to 2011-11-23 10:43:30
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Wed Nov 23 10:43:30 2011 + 0 S - ETA changed from (no value) to 2011-11-24 10:43:30
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Wed Nov 23 10:43:30 2011 + 0 S - Ticket created
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I cloned my XP OS (mainly to move it to my second hard drive, create a copy for "Games XP" for my son, and not use up my solid state hard drive space with games) and all was fine. I created with the tools a second virtual hard drive, started the new cloned copy of XP (Game XP), formatted the new drive and then used it. Game XP now had a drive C: and a drive E:. I moved several programs to it, adjusted my XP registry and all three programs ran fine. I then shut down Game XP, returned to the original XP install (Work XP) which worked fine. I uninstalled three games programs on Work XP. Then I shut down Work XP, and rebooted Game XP. The second hard drive disappeared! When I check with XP tools the "virtual physical drive" was there but listed as unallocated!). I checked the Main File for for the "Game XP" virtual OS and it contained the second hard drives file with 15 gigs of content. See Snap Show image which shows "Show Package Contents" for both the main VM file and !
then the SECOND hard drive file.

How do I recover this 'missing unallocated virtual second hard drive?"

Mike

Download Screen Shot 2011-11-22 at 10.27.40 PM.png
image/png 172.4k
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Thu Nov 24 04:53:17 2011 + 18 H girishankar.m - Status changed from 'new' to 'waiting for customer'
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Thu Nov 24 04:53:17 2011 + 0 S girishankar.m - Status changed from 'new' to 'waiting for customer'
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Thu Nov 24 04:53:18 2011 + 1 S girishankar.m - ETAlastUpdated changed from 2011-11-23 10:43:30 to 2011-11-24 04:53:18
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Thu Nov 24 04:53:18 2011 + 0 S girishankar.m - ETAlastUpdated changed from 2011-11-23 10:43:30 to 2011-11-24 04:53:18
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Thu Nov 24 04:53:18 2011 + 0 S girishankar.m - ETA changed from 2011-11-24 10:43:30 to (discount)
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Thu Nov 24 04:53:18 2011 + 0 S girishankar.m - ETA changed from 2011-11-24 10:43:30 to (discount)
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Michael, please try to boot VM with a special flag.

1. Shutdown your windows VM (Start button->Power down or smth like this)
3. Go to Virtual Machine -> Configure menu. Browse to CPU tab. Make sure that the "Show advanced settings" checkbox is enabled in the bottom-left corner of the window.
4. Type
devices.sfilter.enable=0

in "System Flags" field.

5. Close Configuration and start the VM

Another way is to uninstall Parallels Tools completely and reboot the VM.
I expect that second disk will be recognized by Windows.
After that install Parallels Tools again.

Hope this helps.
 
I could not find that particular setting on Parallels. I am running parallels 7.

I uninstalled tools and the drive was still not there. Just shows up as unallocated under the windows disk tools.

I tried using TestDisk freeware and the thing listed every drive on my mac, but did not see the "Drive E" virtual second drive I made.

It's gone...

I'll try reformatting it again, but if it's going to disappear each time I reboot, I'll just try to expand my C drive to allow for more space for games.

Thanks for your help.
 
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