Unable to delete the Snapshot

R

Rich Brodsky

Junior Member
I came home last night only to see the error message "unable to delete snapshot" on the screen. I was able to continue working in Windows, but then tried to restart my VM and got the following error when trying to reboot:

"unable to delete the snapshot. An error occurred while reading the disk"

I'm running Parallels 5 and my VM is about 100GB in size.

I've called Parallels support multiple times now and they have had me try the following:
Try to restore from or delete snapshots using the snapshot manager
Move the snapshots.xml file and snapshots folder to the desktop and try restarting the machine
Rebuild permissions on my Mac disk

In all cases I get the exact same error again:

"unable to delete the snapshot. An error occurred while reading the disk"

I am now trying to merge snapshots, but my experience in the past is that this will simply continue to run forever and I will need to force quit out of this process eventually. I do have a backup of my VM on another drive, but that was after I started getting this error. Are there any other ways to approach this problem and delete the snapshot on the disk?
 
Can you give me more about your configuration on your Mac? What OS version, etc. I think if you have file vault enabled in your profile, and/or have Time Machine backing up a Parallels VM, it may not be able to delete the snapshots. It is possible to install the VM in the "shared" profile folder instead of your profile documents folder, so that the VM file is not affected by File Vault settings in your profile. In the General tab of the Configuration look at "Do not back up with Time Machine." Also look at the "require password to manage snapshots" option. If it is on turn it off. I don't know if that will help you this time, but turning off the VM, and shutting down PD and then turning file vault off might work. I'm just guessing without more information about your configuration.
 
I'm running 10.6.2. It's an 8-Core Mac Pro with 12GB of Ram. I don't have File Vault enabled and I don't have TM backing up. I've copied the VM to an entirely different drive and tried booting from the copy and get the same error. Let me know if you need any more info.
 
There is also a Security Configuration setting that requires passwords for "managing" or deleting a VM snapshot. At the bottom of the VM screen look for the configuations, look at the Security panel and see if your settings require a password for managing snapshots. Maybe...
 
Well Level 2 tech support logged in to my machine and after tolling around for about 3 hours, they gave up. They need to talk to the developers. Yikes! Meanwhile, I just installed XP again from scratch on a new VM and am able to at least mount the old drive and drag data over. I think I'll keep Snapshots off though until they fix it.
 
snapshots

I decreased the frequency in my settings to one every 12 hr.s, and there would probably be nothing wrong with just manually making a few at important times. Maybe just use time machine like everything else?
 
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