3036: can I rescue booting via Parallels into my Boot Camp Win XP?

J

jamesrob

Junior Member
I installed Parallels beta 2 (build 3036), and for several days I was able to use either booting from Power up into Windows only (my Boot Camp partition) or via Parallels into a virtualized space. Unfortunately, today I screwed up and quit Parallels (the application) while Windows XP was starting up (to make things even worse, I'd last used Windows as a direct boot, had put my MacBook Pro to sleep (I can't remember what the Windows jargon for this is, but it's not "Hibernate"; something like pause or suspend.

In any event, now when I double click the Windows XP virtual machine icon on my Mac desktop, Parallels launches, the virtual environment descriptor dialog appears, I'm asked to enter my Mac administrator password (all normal), but then a dialog appears saying "unable to open partition: Boot Camp"

I can still boot directly into Windows from Power Up, so that Boot Camp partition isn't totally hosed. Can I uninstall Parallels, then reinstall the more recent beta? After uninstalling Parallels, is there any Windows utility I should run to check the integrity of the Boot Camp partition before trying to add the new beta?

Any other incantations, prayers, or fetishes I should acknowledge before trying to do another installation?

Thanks so much,
 
Further details

Turns out my Boot Camp Windows XP Home installation is hosed as well. I was able to boot into it once after the Virtualization solution stopped working. Now Windows hangs during the boot process. Safe Boot found a corrupt file <Windows root>\system32.hal.dll>, and tells me to reinstall that file. Can I do that from my Windows XP Home install CD, or do I need to trash my Boot Camp partition (or uninstall my Boot Camp partition, uninstall Parallels beta 3094, then start over?

Thanks so much for any and all advice,
Jim Robertson
 
haralds said:
You should be able to do a repair install.
It saves reinstalling the applications, but is still a pain...
Click to expand...

Windows said it couldn't do a repair install because of missing files (System32\HAL.dll and System32\ntoskrnl.exe). I did another Windows XP install to a different folder and copied the missing files into my old installation, and now I have my Boot Camp partition working again.
 
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