Shared NTFS virtual drive between 2 Windows VMs - files lost!

C

CathleenC

Bit poster
Does anyone else have experience sharing a virtual hard drive between two guest machines?

I have:
Parallels Desktop 7
Guest 1: Windows XP
Guest 2: Windows 7

Both the Windows XP and the Windows 7 machine were connected to a 2nd virtual hard drive, set up initially under the Windows XP machine and formatted as NTFS.

After not using the Windows 7 machine for a few weeks, I started it up again two days ago. When I went to use some of the files on the second virtual drive, they were completely gone.

Help!

I've lost 6 weeks of files. I have a backup from 3 weeks ago, but that still leaves 3 weeks of work gone.

I called Parallels support, but they were unable to help me. I tried an NTFS file recovery tool, run from the Windows XP virtual machine, but it only recovered old files that had been deleted more than 6 weeks ago.

At this point I would be happy if someone could just explain to me how Parallels managed to wipe out 6 weeks worth of files, simply by connecting the virtual drive to another virtual machine.

Regards,
Catemaco
 
Dear Catemaco,

Parallels Desktop works with virtual hard drives just the same way the real computer works with the real hard drives.
The issue you are describing can be caused by many different things: Mac hardware problems (including broken hard disk sectors), power outages that lead to file corruption, Windows file system issues and so on.
Does that data disk look ok? Is the file structure corrupted or not? What is the size of the virtual hard disk if you look at it from Disk Management tool (Start -> Control Panel -> Administrative tools -> Computer management -> Storage -> Disk management) , from Virtual machine Configuration editor (Virtual machine menu -> Configure -> hardware -> Hard Disk1), from Mac OS (open the corresponding Virtual machine's .pvm bundle, check the size of the corresponding .hdd file - is it of the same size as before or smaller?)
Does you Virtual machine have snapshots? (Virtual machine -> manage snapshots)
Is it possible to mount the Virtual hard drive to mac? (right-click the corresponding .hdd bundle and choose 'Open with... Parallels Mounter' The disk should appear in Finder Side bar under 'Devices')

Waiting for your reply.
 
Hi, SergeyL,

The file system looks fine, except for the fact that no files after March 30th show up. March 30th was the last day I used the Windows 7 virtual machine.

My suspicion is that the master file table on for the 2nd, data disk was somehow stored with the Windows 7 virtual machine, not with the virtual hard drive itself. Does that make sense?

The Parallels support person mounted the data disk from the Mac side, but none of the more recent files showed up.

There were snapshots for the Windows 7 machine, but not for the Windows XP machine.

The size of the virtual disk has not changed when looking at it in Disk Management in Windows, or from the Parallels Configuration page for the Windows XP machine. I don't know if the size of the .hdd directory has changed. (The .hdd file inside that directory says 0 bites, and there are 2 .hds files, but I don't know if that is the same as before or not.)

Since this happened, I've been asked several times by Parallels if I wanted to compress this disk to recover space. I've just answered no.

Catemaco
 
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