The Drive where Windows is installed is locked.

Hello -


I have a 15" Mac Pro Retina running the latest OS with Parallels 8 and Win 8 Pro. This combination has been running incredibly well for about 2 months until last week when I suddenly had disk space issues - I managed to increase the disk space for Windows from 150 to 202 gB but on trying to re-start the VM I got the error message -

"The Drive where Windows is installed is locked. Unlock the drive and try again." Automatic repair fails and when I try "RESET your PC", the following message appears - "Unable to reset your PC. A required drive partition is missing".

This seems to be a Windows problem but I am quite unsure about how to fix this (if possible) inside Parallels. I have tried digging a bit deeper using the cmd prompt and DISKPART - while LIST DISK shows "Disk 0" being active and of 202 gb size, it also says that there is only 1024 kb free; plus, no other DISKPART options work.

Can anyone offer any sugesstions or help ?

 

Hi Craig,

Welcome to Parallels Forums!

I'd suggest to follow these steps for start:

1. Make a backup of your VM: http://kb.parallels.com/8829
2. Run Windows 8 Repair: http://kb.parallels.com/114987

P.S. Do you have any previous backups? For example Time Machine?

 

Hi Andrew -

Thanks for your welcome and also thanks for replying to my query.

Trying to use F8 (or even Shift-F8) while starting the VM is just not working - it totally ignores me.

At your suggestion I am in the process of copying the .pvm file to my Time Capsule but it's 158gB so will take a little while.

Once that has finished I'll check back through my Time Machine back-ups and see if I can resurrect anything. However, while backing up to Time Machine, I haven't been in the Mac World long enough yet to ever have restored anything ! It was easy gettng started on Time Machine with back ups so I can't imagine it'll be that hard to restore from it.

Thanks again.