Hi Alicia,
I've done a little more investigating. The good news is that the issue is repeatable, and can be corrected repeatedly. Here's what I did, starting with the recently recovered and working Boot Camp partition:
1) My VM is configured to use the physical CD/DVD drive.
2) Boot the VM, get the 'first time' warning.
3) Wait for the first time install to complete and the VM restarts
4) Interestingly, the VM hangs at the restart, and I have to Force Quit the Parallels app.
5) Boot the MacPro into Vista natively via Boot Camp
6) The startup animation starts (green blocks), then hangs
Oops it's broken again! Now I assume that the initial Parallels install has caused the issue. Interestingly, I don't think the full tools install has happened yet (because the physical CD/DVD is configured and the prtools image hasn't been used/mounted yet.
(I also tried a start with boot logging, [F8]. Whatever happens causes the system to halt before the bootlog.txt file can be created, it's not there!).
Anyway, it's broken.
7) Force shutdown the MacPro (hold the power button).
8) Restart from the Vista install DVD.
9) Choose Repair.
10) Unselect the windows installation (click anywhere away from the selected item)
11) Click Next to go to the repair tools
12) Start a command prompt
13) type 'rstrui.exe /offline:c:\Windows'
14) go to the list of restore points
15) click on the show restore points older than 5 days
16) scroll down the list to find the restore point before the Parallels tools install (or a restore point you know to be good)
17) Restore to this point
18) Restart (into Windows directly)
This works for me.
As I said above, it would appear from this test that the issue is introduced by the first time parallels install.
All of my tests are done with the following configuration:
MacPro Quad 2.66 (MacPro1,1), 11Gb RAM, and loads of disk
MacOSX 10.5.1
Vista Ultimate
Parallels 3 build 5160
The only other piece of software that might have an impact is macfuse core 10.5 1.1.1
I hope this helps the Parallels team, and others experiencing similar issues.
Regards
RTH
Last edited: Nov 24, 2007