Unable to boot Windows XP (SP3) virtual machine

T

tenfourty

Bit poster
Hi,

My company is rolling out Pointsec HDD security on all our computers and since I have one of their images running on my parallels (4.0) virtual machine the Pointsec installer was run on my virtual machine.

After running the installer the computer was supposed to boot up again.

However once the virtual machine starts rebooting the BIOS loads fine, and I get as far as the message:
Trying to boot from Primary Master IDE drive...

And then the virtual machine hangs while consuming around 100% CPU with the prl_vm_app process.

I'm able to browse the drive fine with the Parallels Explorer.app but I don't know how to get my image to start booting again.

Can anyone help with this problem?

Thanks
 
I don't know how Pointsec exactly works, so I'm going to shoot in the dark here...
Dunno if it's required that Parallels supports HDD encryption. Maybe Pointsec requires some sort of validation before it decrypts the drive, a Smartcard? Also, Pointsec probably installs some sort of minimal OS that takes care of decryption if that OS is, says, Linux, having the VM configured for Windows guest would make Linux not boot at all.
 
I can try leaving it running overnight... but I've already run it for an hour with no progress indication or anything.

My hunch is that the MBR or something is stacked and I need to reinstate that, but I'm not sure how to do that or check for that.

The disc is definitely not encrypted yet because I'm able to browse files using Parallels Explorer.
 
In that case you'll need your XP CD...

You'll have to boot from it and run the Recovery Console, to fix the MBR run FIXMBR.

If the problem is more serious you'll to do a Repair Install of Windows, preferably with a slipstreamed XP CD (or .iso) with SP3.

This last choice will not delete your files or programs but it will reset all Windows settings and installation to the default like a fresh install but without losing files.
 
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