I'm having trouble with Parallels forgetting about a virtual machine on an external drive. Background Because I was running out of space on my Mac's internal hard drive, I moved the folder containing my virtual machine to an external drive, and then loaded it back into Parallels. (I could not use the File -> Clone... menu item inside Parallels, because it claimed I didn't have enough drive space to make the move.) Everything worked just fine. I now had two different machines: Windows Vister Windows Vister External After playing around with this setup, I decided I could afford to throw out the Windows Vister machine and reclaim the internal disk space. So...I used the File -> Delete menu item to delete the Windows Vister machine. To see if Parallels was robust enough to function when the external drive was disconnected, I quit Parallels and unmounted (ejected) the external drive. I then started Parallels, expecting it to complain about not being able to find the Windows Vister External machine. Instead, it wanted to install a guest operating system. I bailed, and Parallels quit automatically. I then plugged in the external drive and started Parallels, fully expecting to see Windows Vister External show up as a possible virtual machine to use. No such luck. Parallels had forgotten that I had this second virtual machine, so it tried to get me to install a guest operating system. Since Parallels automatically quit when I told it not to install an unneeded guest operating system, I couldn't tell it to look on the external drive for the machine it had known about not 5 minutes earlier. When I opened the preferences with the PropertyListEditor, I see no mention of the virtual machine on the external drive. I guess I should have pre-empted Parallels short-term memory bug by saving my preferences, but now that things are apparently hosed, I have some questions. Questions My question: How to I convince Parallels that I don't want to install a guest OS without it quitting, so that I can point it to the existing virtual machine? Side questions: Why did it forget that there was a second machine after I used the Parallels tools to get rid of the Windows Vister machine? Would it have been smarter to delete the files by hand? Is Parallels so fragile that it cannot keep up with a common occurrence such as an unmounted drive?
