Parallel crashed now says pvs not valid and hdd is corrupt

My Parallel environment - which happens to be Win XP crashed. I believe this was when it says there was an update and was downloading this (last week). I did snapshots in my environment. I had 2. I had just done a snapshot earlier in the day. In the afternoon I was installing a trial version of Visio. I received a message about space I believe and it shut down. I read things online about going into the .hdd package, copying the largest .hds over and renaming it to winxp.hdd This did NOT work. It says the .hdd is corrupt. Not only that it says the .pvs is not a valid parallels configuration file. I am at my wits end. I thought I being safe by making snap shots. It seems many people are having issues lately. And saying "oh well you have to recreate your environment, reinstall windows, etc. " is NOT an adequate response.

 

1. backup VM
2. http://kb.parallels.com/en/4680
but try every file not the largest and the latest

 

tried the other .hds

I tried that with the remaining .hds in the .hdd package.
It did not work. I went into the config ( I also got a message that the config file was not a valid file ).
I selected the new .hdd then it asked me "Choose the Windows XP installation mode: Express or Custom".
Now this seems really strange. Especially since the .hdd is 15 gb....

 

Please click one of the Quick Reply icons in the posts above to activate Quick Reply.

 

what if my back up is old

it does not allow the 'merge snapshots" option when i use the disk tool.

if i have my backup of winxp parallel environment, but it is much older. i have installed other apps, etc.
and created snapshots. thinking that if anything happened to my windows environment i would go back to a previous snapshot. But this seems to be a Parallels issue. i just wish i knew what to combine to allow it to work. obviously if my .hdd is 15 gb something is still there....

 

Try to run SnapShot manager from menu Actions

 

Snapshot manager is empty

No snapshots show up...

 

Bad, what you can see in Virtual machine folder
I mean files

 

my files

Here is a picture of the files i know have. After trying suggestions.
Thanks very much.

 

Try following steps:
1. Backup Virtual machine
2. Create new one, but do not start it, just quit, rename newly created winxp.hdd to soemthing and copy winxp.hdd to that new VM folder
3. Try to start VM, do not perform OS installation if suggested
if it fails perform kb 4680 on that winxp.hdd

 

3. Perform what ? on the winxp.hdd ?
Thanks

 

If VM failed to start perform solution from 4680 http://kb.parallels.com/en/4680 on winxp.hdd from new VM

 

I already did that option...

 

I mean from the new VM folder

 

Help!!!

Hi everybody,

I got the same problem with my VM (parallels desktop with XP).

I tried this...http://kb.parallels.com/en/4680

I got two .hds files. The bigger and latest one has no operating system so I cannot run it on the new VM. This file contains all my documents I need to retrieve.

The other .hds file (smaller) is running on the new VM but it has only the operating system (no docs or apps).

Can I eventually merge these two files or run the first .hds file to retrieve these docs?

I really need your help, since I cannot recover important docs.

Thanks a lot,
Diego

 

Hi everybody,

I got the same problem with my VM (parallels desktop with XP).

I tried this...http://kb.parallels.com/en/4680

I got two .hds files. The bigger and latest one has no operating system so I cannot run it on the new VM. This file contains all my documents I need to retrieve.

The other .hds file (smaller) is running on the new VM but it has only the operating system (no docs or apps).

Can I eventually merge these two files or run the first .hds file to retrieve these docs?

I really need your help, since I cannot recover important docs.

Thanks a lot,
Diego