Yet Antother 4.0 Upgrade Issue

I must say that I thought people were going a bit 'over the top' bashing this software upgrade until I tried it myself.

Here are my issues and what I have done thus far to try and correct them. Any insight on any of the issues would be appreciated.

1. Just as an initial comment: I bought Paralles 3 in the middle of september, but don't have my receipt. Contacting support about a free upgrade license got me an email asking for a copy of the receipt. I had thought there would be some record of when I registered the software, but apparently not. So not wanting to fight it out and possibly waste the $10 savings I can get until the end of November I plunked down the $39.95 for the upgrade. So I'm out some money.

2. I backed up my 3.0 image (VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED as you will need it later) and moved forward with the 4.0 upgrade. All went well until step 2 of the conversion where I was told I would need to boot into the image and continue 'manually'. As soon as I login to windows xp with my username/pw I get a single message about a registry key that was fixed, and then the error 0x800700c1 saying that a problem is preventing Windows from accurately checking the license for this computer. Clicking OK takes me back to the login screen. So I can't log in.

3. I went through the above 3 times and then read the MS Knowledge Base article about starting in safe mode to change some registry values. I tried this. I could not even boot into safe mode. I got the "safe mode" text in the upper right and left sides of the screen and then a black screen that didn't change after waiting about 5 minutes. I then tried changing some of the VM settings as I had memory set at 1.5 gigs. I used the recommended 512, but that did not change anything. So no safe mode

4. I restarted the process again and figured I'd send one of the "Report a Problem" tickets. I typed up my message and clicked submit and was told that sending the ticket failed, I should check my network connection. Meanwhile I'm reading this forum on the web and am completely confident that the network connection was just fine. So I went in and tried again. Same result. So I can't send a ticket.

5. At this point I decide to go back to 3.0 and try the upgrade to 4.0 again. I uninstalled 4.0, rebooted. I installed 3.0, re-installed parallels tools to get the versions right, and rebooted the win xp virtual machine. I then used disk utility to check and repair permissions in the event that something like that was getting in my way (it wasn't). I then rebooted. I installed 4.0. I rebooted. I then loaded my image and started the conversion process whereby I was promptly told at that start of step 2 that I had to continue manually..... I knew where this was going.

Overall I have spent the better part of today working on my parallels upgrade to no avail. I am extremely disappointed with this product upgrade and agree with the feeling I am getting by reading this forum that it was not ready. I know you can't be prepared with every possible consumer set-up prior to release, but in my mind I have a very standard setup.

I have a macbook that was purchased around September 10th (so I know it is new enough).
It has 140GB hard drive of which 10GB are available
It has 4GB of ram of which 512Mb are assigned to the VM
I have a 35GB windows image that works just great in parallels 3.0
Said image is filled with very standard windows-y stuff and still has about 10GB free itself.
I do not have file vault on.
I added parallels to the firewall to accept incoming connections

I don't get it. I should not have had to pay for this in the first place, but I'm doubly frustrated that I can't get it working after paying extra money to element 5 for it.

Any help would be appreciated.

-Jeff

 

Update

Just wanted to update my progress. I'm pretty committed to cracking this nut, so hopefully this will be of some use after I figure it out.

I downgraded to 3.0 again, but this time after the downgrade I got rid of my connection to my domain and joined a workgroup. I then made the administrator the default login account and enabled auto logins per this Microsoft KB article.

I thought this might get me past the manual step since I have been getting hung up during login. The interesting thing is that I still get the exact same error about the windows license. So I found this thread about my exact error code number, and this one about the error message that I am getting. It is interesting though that my error code seems to be one related to windows update for most people, but I'm getting it for a license check.

Anyway, I decided to try going into safe mode again to perform the steps recommend in the first link, but I still can't get there. Right now my machine is going through the seemingly endless "Recovering Orphaned File" thing that other users have had happen. This happened once yesterday too and it finished in about 30 minutes.

Anyway, still no luck but I'm trying. If anyone has any thoughts I'd appreciate hearing them.

 

http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=31940

 

Screenshot

Here's a screenshot of the 2 message boxes in case that helps.

-Jeff

 

Hi Mithrandir

I Successfully Upgraded From PD3 To PD4.

Since The Upgrade Was Going To Remove PD3 Anyway,
I Thought I'd Try To Make The PD4 Install As Clean As Possible.
Before Upgrading To PD4,
I First Removed Parallels Tools From My BootCamp VM In PD3.
(Edit VM -> Hard Disk (Advanced) Remove Parallels Tools)
Maybe This Helped.

The Duelist

 

I'll try that. I am pretty much out of options now. I thought my issue with safe mode might have been related to choosing 'safe mode with networking' so I just tried the plain vanilla safe mode. That won't load either. I just get the following screen (I left it for 15 minutes this time to be sure). I'll post an update after I try your method. It will take a little bit to copy my backup over for 3.0 to use. Thanks for your help!

 

No dice. If any additional system information would be helpful please let me know. Thanks for giving me something to try though.

 

Please tell me what have you done after seeing the message about manual mode? You were better to follow the article:
http://kb.parallels.com/en/5718

 

I did actually follow that from another post initially. IMMEDIATELY after logging in I get the two error boxes I attached above. After clicking OK I am automatically logged out by windows. Then every subsequent login gives me the message about the license only. It is an endless loop. Any further information on that specific error would be really helpful. As of right now I'm back to 3.0 and waiting on a fix from Parallels since I can't get past the login.

 

Hi again,
as for Windows license, it happens because upgrading to a new Parallels Desktop version causes changes in the virtual hardware. So if you contact Microsoft and explaun them the situation they msut provide you with a new license.

As I understand, getting the error you are not allowed to enter a key. Am I correct?
What I would suggest in your case is to create a new virtual machine in PD4, based on existing virtual hard disk. Know how to do this?
After it you will probably need to reactivate Windows.

 

Anna,

Thanks for the reply. I read something about the re-activation on a post that I can't find now. Anyway, I have no problem contacting Microsoft to get a new key. If you have a link to any instructions related to what you are asking me to do I'd appreciate it.

You are correct that I am never given the opportunity to put in a key. I get the error right away.

-Jeff