Trial period issue

Trial period issue: can't import a Fusion 3.0.1 VM

In trying to import a VMWare Fusion VM of XP Pro, I received this (unhelpful) error message: "This virtual hard disk cannot be processed because something is wrong with it. Please contact the Parallels support team for assistance."

Apparently I can't contact the "support team" via the support page since I don't have a registered product (yet). I need to see this work before I purchase the product.

Any ideas on how to get this resolved would be appreciated.

 

I should have mentioned that this is on a 2009 Mac Pro running SL 10.6.2 with 12 GB RAM.

 

That *is* a cool error message.

You could try to remove the Fusion tools from the virtual hard disk you're trying to import before you try again. Maybe that helps. You could also try to clean up that drive (in Fusion) by using Windows' built in clean-up tools (e.g. the defrag tool).

Good luck.

 

Thanks for the suggestion but I am reluctant to mess with a production VM since I don't know what removing the VM Tools will do to Windows activation. I was hoping there was a log file written somewhere during the import function that would give a clue. The VM is over 120 GB and I don't have hard disk space to make a copy to play with.

If any Parallels personnel watch this forum, I'd appreciate a contact at my registered email.

 

I'd suggest you buy yourself a cheap usb drive (they're really cheap these days) and back up the vm. that's one of the wonderful points of a vm - you can back it up, play with it, and when you've broken it, just throw it away and copy the backup back to your machine.

 

Again thanks. I can certainly do that but I was hoping for a more definitive approach to resolving the problem other than a random walk of trying different things.

I've had some problems with running a Win 7 boot camp partition in Fusion that apparently Parallels doesn't have, at least based on the trial thus far. If I can get this VM working as well, I plan to switch to Parallels.

I guess Parallels personnel either don't monitor this forum or don't know how to proceed with this error message.

 

Tried your suggestions and got the same fun-filled error message. I guess Parallels won't work for me and I'll stay with Fusion.

 

Just to close the loop on this...

I decided to take a chance and purchase Parallels. After a number of conversations with support, I installed Parallels Tranporter Agent on the VM in question and saved the resultant file to an external hard disk. Then I used Parallels Transporter to bring in the file file from the hard disk to the Mac. After a few hours, I had a Parallels VM! All worked fine even with the VMWare tools in place. The VM is alive and well.

As an apparent side benefit, VS2005 seems much more responsive.