What I learned in installing Win 10 under Parallels

T

Terry729

Member
I have spent the last several days following posts here and in the Windows forums and after many attempts have installed Win 10 on my MacBook Pro under Parallels. What I have mainly learned is that the real memory requirements are not spelled out. I have installed, probably the most memory intensive configuration, so this should work for others. I installed Windows 10 Pro with both 32 bit and 64 bit capability.
As reported here, clicking on the Windows 10 icon in the system tray brings you the information that you have the wrong display driver and not enough memory.
I finally used the Windows Media Creation Tool x64 (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/media-creation-tool-install ). However, they don't warn you about two things 1) The download goes to RAM and 2) in the configuration I chose, it's over 5 GB. Therefore you must have ample RAM in the download machine (or the download never gets past 0%) and the best download medium is a USB stick of 8GB or more. I was sticking at 0% when downloading to my Win 7 Pro under Parallels and the first (4GB) stick that I downloaded to was unreadable. I downloaded to my Win7 desktop which has 16GB of RAM with no problem. If you're going to download to your Win VM under Parallels, go to the red parallel lines above your screen, select configure and increase your Memory allocation to about 10GB. While you're at it increase your Disk1 allocation from 63GB to more like 128GB. If you do those two things and download to an 8GB+ USB stick your install should go smoothly and take about six hours. (I have a 3mb dl dsl link and the first download takes about five hours, YMMV).
After the Media Creation Tool creates the files on the USB stick you should be able to plug it into your MAC (if it wasn't created there), run Setup.exe (under Windows) and watch it go for about an hour more.
 
This worked like a dream. Thank you! It's a shame that the Parallels documentation hasn't been updated to include such useful additional information. Until I came across your post, I'd previously spent many hours unsuccessfully trying to find a solution. Thanks again.
 
I've tried the following....
  • Upgrade via tray icon - Fails due to display driver
  • Upgrade using downloaded ISO - fails with "The installation failed in the SAFE_OS phase with an error during APPLY_IMAGE operation"
  • Upgrade using media creation tool "Upgrade this PC now" option - gets to end of verifying download and simply quits without explaination.
  • Upgrade using media creation tool to generate an ISO - fails with "The installation failed in the SAFE_OS phase with an error during APPLY_IMAGE operation"
The two ISO options get as far as the black screen with the circle but at that point they ALWAYS completely lock up the entire iMac. Eventually causing it to reboot due to a problem. When the VM fires up again I see the "The installation failed in the SAFE_OS phase with an error during APPLY_IMAGE operation" error.
 
I've Win7 Basic installed on my MacBook Pro via Parallels Desktop 10. Following the instructions provided by Parallels by assigning my virtual machine with more than 2GB of RAM, I tried the free upgrade to Windows 10 using the Download Tools Now (64-bit) from Microsoft.

However, I keep getting the message that my Mac is unable to run Win10 as it doesn't have enough RAM. For the record, until recently I've Windows 10 Preview working fine when I first installed Parallels Desktop 10 when I first bought my Mac in March this year. Can anyone provide any insights and/or offer a solution?
 
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