We recently set out to test Transporter by moving everything off a Dell Optiplex series desktop. Fairly standard XP install, nothing too fancy. The move took all night, but went. However, on launching build 3120 of Parallels and then trying to boot the newly-minted VM, we found that it consistently bluescreened with a "bad header pool" error. Any ideas or suggestions as to what might be causing this? Thanks! Brian
I am having the exact same problem. I'm running the final release version of Parallels and Transporter, which came out at the end of Feb. It gives a constant BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) with the BAD HEADER POOL error. Booting into Safe Mode, it says "This copy of Windows is not activated, and you're running Safe Mode so you can't activate it. Boot into Windows normally..." But of course, it's BSOD again when booting normally. Looks like a Windows Activation (WGA) error... @!#$ing Microsoft.
an update Here's another update. If you're having this problem, disable all devices (USB, Network, CD-ROM) and the virtual machine will now boot without the BAD_HEADER_POOL error. But the installation will be crippled. You'll be taken to a screen that asks you to Activate Windows before you can continue. Since no network is possible (it needs to be disabled just to boot without a Blue Screen), you'll have to use telephone activation. Since my computer has the OEM version of XP (it came with the hardware), I can't call Microsoft... because they will tell me that I can't migrate the OEM license into a virtual machine, right? Ugh... So as far as I can see it, due to WGA licensing issues Transporter isn't useful for anyone except in a corporate environment where Activation issues may not exist. This is sad...
I think it's supposed to be BAD_POOL_HEADER, that's my message and it makes a little more sense from an OBSCURE_WINDOWS_BSODMSG standpoint. It seems to be a driver issue. Disable everything BUT the ethernet and then try. Re-enable items one at a time. For me it was the CD-ROM driver. But I can live without any of that with the drag-and-drop feature. Everything else was cool. The issue now is that I can't install "Parallels Tools" without a CD-ROM. Frankly, I'd call that a pretty minor issue, everything else works great!
Some success I used Transporter to move my XP/SP2 image, and got stuck at the the BAD_HEADER_POOL issue for a while. Ultimately, the problem seemed to be with the "virtual cd-rom drive" used to mount the ISO image containing the tools - I was able to burn the ISO image to a physical CD-ROM and install the tools that way.
