Snow Leopard virtual machine broken

S

Steve Rickaby

Bit poster
Parallels Desktop 9.0.24251, OS X 10.9.5
Following some sort of crash, the virtual machine will not reboot. On the grey screen I get a couple of partial progress bars (which I have not seen before), and then nothing.
Can anyone advise how to repair/restart the virtual machine? I've backed off to a previous good VM, but all my mail is
in the bust one. Am stuck...
 
Update: I booted the Snow Leopard VM using the install disk and ran Disk Utility, which said that the boot disk was unreparable.
Can anything be rescued?
 
I cannot get prl_disk_tool to accept the crashed VM HDD: it says '
Unable to perform the operation because the virtual machine that uses this disk is not stopped. Shut down the virtual machine and try again.', but I cannot shut down the VM with the bad disk because I cannot run it. Help!
 
Update: I got pro_disk_tool to run on the crashed VM HDD. It reported no errors, but the VM still would not boot. Anyone got any ideas?
 
1. Try single user mode ... go into config on the VM, enter
devices.mac.boot_args="-s
try and boot it - if it comes up, run fsck as suggested in the console messages. Then "sudo shutdown -h now".
2. Install a separate SL VM, add the problem disk as a second "hard drive", boot the new SL VM and use it to debug the problem "hard drive"
 
Thanks for your response. I guess you mean to enter that in the 'boot flags' field. What I get is a console screen with the legend 'Press ESC to select the boot device', but this does not respond to ESC and rapidly disappears, to be replaced with a Parallels logo-ed screen that says 'Press any key to select startup options' and a backwards-running progress bar. This also does not respond to key presses and times out, to give the same failed startup screen I got before. This has the Apple logo and a progress bar which only gets part way before the boot falls over.
I have a recovery thumb drive with DiskWarrior on it, which is supposed to be good for this sort of situation, but although I can get it to show up in available boot drives in Startup Disk options when I boot the bad VM from the install DVD, selecting it does not boot from it - it boots back into the startup DVD again. Alsoft have not been able to help with this so far.
 
I have copied the .pvm file for my virtual machine to an external drive before and opened it on a windows machine just because that is what i had. I could then see some of the files for my vm. Have you tried booting into safe mode or recovery mode and repairing the Virtual disk? You would have to boot into safe mode inside the VM also not on your main system since it is a .pvm file and not a disk partition. You can boot into safe mode by holding the shift key while starting the machine. If this does not work i have had success fixing a corrupted install by booting into recovery mode (Command + R while booting)and reinstalling os x. This option keeps all your files in place to. Do you by chance have a time machine backup?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top