Faulty hard drive replaced - getting hard drive and OS error

Hello there

We have a MacBook Pro which had a new hard drive fitted yesterday due to the old one being faulty. Before it was replaced I was doing regular backups using Time Machine onto a WD external drive.

I did a full restore using Time Machine this morning and everything is present and correct as I expected, except when I tried to start my VM I got an error which said it was unable to connect to hard drive 1.

It then said there is no operating system installed in this VM. Please insert an os CD etc...

I have read Peter Pan's problem below which is similar and I've looked on my external drive at previous .hdd files and they all seem to be MB not GB, which I guess suggests that the backup wasn't working? I presume there's no point me trying to restore an earlier version as they are all about the same size? I've tried putting the windows 7 disc in to re-install that on my VM and I get an error saying the drivers cannot be found.

We only use Parallels for our Sage accounts and luckily the accountant has a backup copy of those.

My question is what do I need to do now to get Parallels back up and running - assuming I'll need to start from scratch and will have lost everything that was on there before? Also, what is the best way to ensure this doesn't happen again? I feel like a fool for assuming that a Time Machine backup would be enough to keep my VM up and running.

I am not terribly technical so the simpler answers the better. And many thanks in advance...

 

Note:
I see my nick referred in this post as being 'my problem', for reference it wasn't my problem, it was another user's problem which I was helping with. Please correct that reference (use the Edit button on your post).

 

Please accept my apologies Specimen, I was going off my memory which is very unreliable and remembered the name of the last poster, who at the time was yourself, rather than the poster themselves. Corrected as asked.

 

Alright, thank you.

If you have to start over follow the User Guide, step by step everything is explained there, basically, Create a New Virtual Machine and Install Windows on there. File > New... etc.

As for best approach for backing up, my preference goes to actually copying the .pvm file/package (shut down the VM first, not a good idea to do this while it's running) to a safe place periodically, if anything goes wrong, like it did now, you can drop it in Parallels folder again and click on it to had to the VM list.

This is what Parallels recommends: http://kb.parallels.com/en/8829
This is the article specifically for Time Machine: http://kb.parallels.com/8827