I received the following message from parallels: Virtual Machine cannot be started because of the following problem. Parallels desktop is unable to access the virtual hard disk image file: /users/mskreind/documents/parallels/microsoftwindowsXP/winxp.hdd. The file is missing, corrupted or used by other application. There was no way that I knew of to retrieve my Windows program. It completely disappeared. This episode happened after starting my MacBook Pro after being turned off. Has this ever happened to anyone else and if so was there any way to retrieve the Windows XP. I trashed everything and started over.
