So Fedora 16 is an early adopter of Linux 3.3, I updated yesterday, rebuilt Parallels tools (which failed) and now my system hangs during the boot process. The problem is that the prlvideo module is not present.
So far so understandable, new linux kernel released and Parallels tools may not have caught up, the trouble is I can't seem to recover the situation by booting a previous system version or attempting to mount Parallels tools again.
I can boot my system into runlevels 1 or 3 from the grub console and it works in dumb terminal mode, executing startx in runlevel 3 fails with a complaint about being unable to find prlvideo. The obvious remedy is to boot a previous system version (I keep 3 for exactly this eventuality), try that and no joy, same hang and same root cause. Doing telinit 5 from runlevel 3 again hangs the system.
The obvious next step is to keep booting into runlevel 3 and rebuliding ParallelTools until it works, the trouble is that I click "Reinstall Parallels Tools", it says it has done so but I can't find the image mounted anywhere (usually /media/Parallels Tools).
So 3 support questions:
Why does updating parallels tools clobber the tools for ALL system versions? Surely it should do it for the current system only.
How do I access Parallels tools again?
How can I recover this situation?
UPDATE: I found an entry in /dev/disk/by-label/Parallels%20Tools - I mounted this and can now attempt to install/update the tools again. Doing this gets me a system which can boot but which complains that Parallels tools are out of date, I suspect that trying to update Parallels Tools will get me a non starting system again so I will leave it for now.
UPDATE 2: I have kind of answered my second 2 questions, the first remains: why after updating Parallels tools following a new kernel am I unable to boot using a previous kernel which had worked before I upgraded?
Last edited: Mar 23, 2012