Last night I my battery ran out whilst running parallels. As my battery had stated that it had 1hr 45 left (it's old) I rebooted, only for the machine to die again. Upon finding my powerpack and pluggin it in, I went to start parallels as I need to test some code in windows browsers. I got a message saying that I had a custom boot camp installation and I needed to refer to the manual. Previous to this parallels had run fine with my bootcamp windows Xp. I rebooted and tried to get into windows but had missing or corrup hal.dll. I fixed this using this article: http://icrontic.com/articles/repair_windows_xp And windows booted fine. restarted and rebooted it to check and still fine. Switch over into mac os x and try parallels an still the same problem. I boot into bootcamp windows and do run > msconfig to look at the boot.ini file. There are three boot entries in there, one of them parallels. I decide that I will try to get rid of the parallels one and the extraneous one. I do and windows still boots fine. Now, I flick back into mac os x and it boots to the dos prompt that briefly appears but now I just get a black screen (after having removed the .vcs file and mybootcamp folder in username/library/parallels/ and set up a new virtual machine using the bootcamp). When I go back into windows it asks for hal.dll again. I fix this. Restart windows and, having read a few things on these forums and elsewhere, remove parallels tools, and then reboot into mac os x. Now I get the 'initialising parallels tools dialogue but no disk activity at all, and after about 15 minutes or so of this it goes to black screen of death. I really need this to be working tonight (as I have to continue my coding for this site I am working on) and really don't want to have to be booting in and out of os x and boot camp to be testing, but I don't know what to try now. I cannot boot into windows via parallels, and but boot camp works. Argh.
Just a bit more info - at some point during that sequence I also got the 'Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem.' And when I try to boot the parallels configuration within parallels, in safe mode, I get a load of stuff like multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\windows\system\drivers\[filename] listed down the screen.
