I needed to have a restricted user account use some VMs I had set up under my personal account, so that the restricted account could be used in a public place to show off cross-platform software.
Rather than the scary prospect of making my virtual machine files read/writable by all users, I made sure my account and the restricted account were in the same group, and then modified the permissions to allow that group read/write access. This did not work for the Windows 7 VM, but seemed to work for the Linux VM. Unfortunately, it worked only once---I booted up Linux under the restricted account, shut down, and went to boot Linux from my account. Failure. (It was very odd to see that Parallels had handily changed the owner of the .pvd bundle and its contents to the secondary account.)
I winced, and changed the permissions for the Linux VMs to allow all users read/write access to its files. This did not help, strangely enough.
I then changed all the permissions back to match those in the Window 7 VM (for matching files, at least).
When I tried to boot up the new Linux machine on the secondary account, it now claimed not to be able to find the hard disk. I quit parallels and switched back to my usual account. When I tried to boot up the Linux machine, it now crashes partway through startup.
The last 15 lines of the parallels.log reveals the following:
Code:
FirstStartInit is OK
[1f:0] Secondary bus number 0xff
[1f:0] Secondary bus number 0xe0
00:10:42.047 F /vm:59162:1d03/ Vm {c6d9274d-f619-45b3-81ff-3bcebbdd9348} processing command DspCmdVmStop ....
00:10:42.167 F /vm:59162:1d03/ begin to stop VM by VM_STOP(ACPI=disable) request.
00:10:42.917 F /vm:59162:3707/ Event loop terminated - deinited
00:10:42.917 F /vm:59162:3707/ Setting ASYNC_REQ_SHUTDOWN for Vm
00:10:42.926 F /vm:59162:7103/ Terminating VCPU event loop - after Monitor switch (0)
00:10:42.960 F /vm:59162:3707/ Terminating CPU #0 ...
00:10:42.971 F /vm:59162:3707/ [Devices] Terminating...
00:10:42.971 F /vm:59162:3707/ [Profile] Networking termination time is 0 msecs
/drv/ HypLowCache.c:390 Attempted to deallocate buffer (0x8084f000) not belonging to low cache
00:19:51.482 W /LocalDevices:58830:3a0f/ net adapter 0: OsX_ipcfg_changed
The only way I can get the Windows 7 VM to start now (from my primary account), is to rename the Linux VM, so that Parallels doesn't insist on trying to start it and then crash.
Any help on how to recover the Linux VM would be appreciated.
If anyone knows, I'm also curious as to why sharing VMs across users on the same machine is made so difficult.
