XP Home - "A disk read error Occurred" - Parallels 4

L

Lee Burbank

Bit poster
I have read all the posts in here, and have tried almost everything. XP was working fine in V 4 for several days, and is a new VM. Windows said that it needed to update so I gave it permission to do so. Then it tried to restart and sat at a black screen. Upon reboot, again goes through the initial sequence, then black screen. Now I am getting the disk read error message. I have checked in explorer, the disk seems fine it is not corrupted. I have gone in and looked for extra files, none there. I have tried to boot from the Windows CDROM to repair it, and it wont work either. Please Help.
 
Hello Lee,

Please follow the below steps to repair windows :

The Windows XP installation CD which you use for repair, must be of the same version and service pack as guest OS installed in the virtual machine, otherwise you may corrupt your system.

1. Click on Virtual Machine on the Parallels Desktop menu bar and choose configure
2. Choose CD/DVD ROM1 make sure that enabled and connected options are checked. Click on ok.
3. Launch the Virtual Machine configuration again.
4. Click on boot order uncheck everything accept CD/DVD Rom, click on ok.
5. Now when you start the Virtual Machine you will get a prompt that says press any key to boot from CD.

Click inside the Virtual Machine window so that it captures the mouse and the keyboard then press any key on the keyboard. Remember when you click inside the virtual machine window, you will have your mouse cursor stuck inside it that means that the mouse and the keyboard are captured.

The configuration of Windows must start the Setup process, wait until it is fully loads and then press Enter (Return).
6. Press F8 (or Fn + F8 keys on the Macbook) to accept the license agreement for Windows.
7. Now Windows should scan your VM to install Windows - wait until the end and choose to repair the existing
installation.
8. Wait until the end of the repair.
9. Try restarting Windows. Reinstall Parallels Tools.
 
not working

I tried your suggestion very early on to no avail. It will not not boot into windows. I have also discovered that although the disk is there and their are folders etc, they are all empty, so I have resigned to starting over again.

I am very, very concerned that Parallels 4.0 is so unstable that it caused windows to wipe out. I did nothing unusual to cause such a catastrophic meltdown.
 
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