Loading Boot Camp partition...

This is odd: Ocassionally--including right now--Parallels will load a screen that says that I need to select my virtual machine. When I select the Windows XP machine that I've set up as a Boot Camp share, I get the following message.

"Virtual machine Microsoft Windows XP cannot be opened since it is already used in another Parallels Desktop window."

I can't do anything after that.

Windows works fine via Boot Camp and has worked fine through Parallels. Windows has obviously been shut down via Boot Camp since I'm working from within the Macintosh environment currently.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I might be able to load Windows via Parallels?

 

rlorenc wrote: "This is odd: Ocassionally--including right now--Parallels will load a screen that says that I need to select my virtual machine. When I select the Windows XP machine that I've set up as a Boot Camp share, I get the following message."
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You can always delete your current Bootcamp VM, go back into Bootcamp natively, install Tools for Bootcamp, restart into OS X, make a new Bootcamp VM, load it, and install Parallels Tools from Parallels.

Since setting up the Bootcamp machine in Parallels is so easy and takes hardly any time, this might be the easiest solution for you, rather than trying to figure out why it is not currently working. Course, if it happens again, you won't be any closer to understanding why. But if time is money, who cares?

Make sure you virtual machines are all turned off completely before re-doing anything.

 

This message is caused by the presence of a lock file that Parallels creates when you start a VM and deletes when you shut it down. If the shutdown isn't clean, the file isn't deleted and you get the message.

The solution is to delete it manually. The file name ends with .lock and is in the VM folder. How to delete it using terminal and a workaround for those uncomfortable with terminal have been posted more than once.

 

Pressing the power button on my PC starts it up, and then Windows loads. While the PC is running, pressing the power button again causes it to shut down. Quite quickly too -- faster than after selecting "start" - "turn off computer" - "turn off" in XP anyway.

And the next startup doesn't indicate that the shut down was "dirty" in anyway.

By the way, I think when running Suse Linux on the same PC, the power button functioned in the same way -- although I can't remember now.

I was wondering if Parallels could adopt something like that.

option 1: pull the plug on the VM.
option 2: clean quick shutdown, as above. Simulate pressing the power button on a PC
option 3: suspend the VM, akin to pressing the pause button.

Now that shutting down the VM is the only "clean" way to get out of Parallels when booted from Boot Camp, I hope that this is implementable.

 

Pressing the power button on a PC is not a clean shutdown. On older PCs it turns off the power immediately and can trash your disk if write data hasn't been flushed. On newer machines it acts as a reset, which also has potential for data loss if write data hasn't been flushed. In any case, it leaves the disk marked dirty (abnormal shutdown) which will sometimes call for a disk check on the next boot. If you wait until the lazy writer finishes before shutdown, and don't happen to catch a timed update, you won't lose anything, otherwise you might. It's bad practice.

Machines do with they do, which isn't always what you want. If that weren't the case though, I wouldn't have a job.