Hi, I have recently purchased a 24" iMac, after being a long time Windows user. Specs are 2.3ghz, 2GB Ram, 250GB HDD, 256mb graphics, BT, AX, SD. I have installed Boot Camp, partitioned off the hard drive and have successfully installed Windows XP SP2 onto the partition, and it works fine when I boot into it. I have installed Parallels, and setup a new VM by using the 'Use Boot Camp' option in the process. That seems to have worked fine. When I go to run the VM, I get an error message "Parallels Desktop cannot find necessary drivers to configure your Boot camp partition. Please refer to Help > Parallels Desktop Help > Using Boot Camp Windows XP Installation for troubleshooting." It doesn't get to even start booting the XP VM. I have reinstalled Parallels twice, and still have the same error message. Both Parallels and Boot Camp are the latest builds (both downloaded less than 24 hours ago). Am I missing something? Is there something else I need to do to get Parallels to use the Boot Camp partition for the XP VM? I'm relatively new to the Mac side of things, so this maybe a newbie question and I apologise if that is the case. Regards.
I've got the same problem here, and I tried copying over the .cab files from the CD like the help doc suggested. Any ideas?
Hi Lnymarko, I have the same problem when starting a bootcamp VM in the latest Parallels release (3186), and so have many users in this forum. So far no workaround has been found. Some users suggested to check if all .cab files are present in the folder windows/Driver Cache/i386. They are in my bootcamp partition, but Paralles doesn't start the bootcamp based VM. Actually, it kills the partition by interfering with system files. I have tried to start the VM several times. Each time I had to repair the bootcamp partition. A Windows Restore ("r") didn't do a good job at this, some software didn't start properly (e.g. lexware, a german bookkeeping software). Fortunately, I could restore the partition from an image created with Drive Image XML. I recommend to create a backup of a bootcamp partition prior to any attempt to start it in Parallels. As for the problem discussed here, we have to wait for a bug fix by the Parallels team. Wonder why they don't mention this problem on their homepage. Regards.
My parallels Boot Camp VM works fine. I just upgraded the build to 3188 and when I launch the Boot Camp VM, I did my usual OSX admin password ( I have to do it twice for some reason) and the Boot Camp VM boots up and it started the parallels Tools install. Does your BootCamp disk disappear off the desktop when you boot into the VM? My boot Camp is 10 g Fat32. I did install the Mac Boot Camp drivers after booting into Boot Camp directly. MacBook Core Duo 1g RAM, 80G HD, w/La CIE FW 250g drive, partitioned w/60g Fat32 win.
Ok I resolved the issue.. Basically what I did was boot into Windows via Boot Camp, reloaded the drivers cd that bootcamp created when first installed, then copied any .cab file I found on the XP CD to the Windows\Driver Cache\ directory. I also made a copy of the driver.cab file and renamed it to sp.cab. After this I was able to recreate the VM in Parallels and it has since worked fine.
