Installing salvaged Parallels application from bad hard drive?

Ok, so my hard drive failed and cannot be recovered or repaired. I have tried to clone the hard drive several times and perform other repairs to no avail, though I was able to copy my users folder which contains all my documents/applications.. I am running maverick and the latest version of parallels with two virtual machines. One is windows 8 and one is windows XP. I really want to try to figure out how i can salvage my parallels installation and install it on my new hard drive. I have some programs that are no longer available anywhere and will only work on windows XP. What are the chances that this is possible? Id Like to in essence cut the Parallels application folder from my old hard drive and paste it onto my new hard drive. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

I think you are confusing a few things...

First, the Parallels Application does not need to be salvaged, you can re-download it from Parallels site (links at the bottom of my post).

What is unique that you might need to salvage is your Virtual Machines, these are .pvm packages that are normally located in Users/<user>/Documents/Parallels or Users/Shared/Documents/Parallels. So that Parallels folder is the one you want to salvage (if the VM is not Bootcamp based).

Secondly, a word of warning, this might come late, but always backup, backup, backup, because the truth is it's very unlikely you'll salvage your VMs, the virtual disk is one big binary file, it's enough for one byte to be corrupted for the whole thing not to work, and the bigger the file the bigger the likelihood of that happening.

Still, with corruption, it might be possible to salvage doing byte by byte copy using dd (UNIX command), but this is job has to be performed by an expert, if the data you have is really valuable, I suggest you contact a data recovery company (example: http://www.ondata-uk.com/ ), although this kind of service is usually expensive, can cost anywhere from 500 EUR to 5000 EUR depending on the level of hardware damage, parts availability and so on.

 

Thank you for the help Specimen. I do understand that i can easily download and reinstall Parallels. You are correct in that I want to save my virtual machines(at least the XP machine) and couldn't really care less about Parallels. So, based on what you are saying it may be possible to copy the .pvm packages to theUsers/<user>/Documents/Parallels or Users/Shared/Documents/Parallels? This is assuming that the files have not been corrupted. Am I understanding this correctly, or am I off? I am wondering if it might be easier/more successful for me to try to repair my hard drive to the point where it can be backed up via time machine or cloned to a fresh drive. Thanks in advance, Dave.

 

I thought that it was well implied that all you need is just to copy the .pvms, everything about the VM is contained there and can be open in any mac running Parallels (preferably the same version or later). What I'm saying is that if you can copy those (by the way, a .pvm isn't actually a file, it's a package, this means it's actually a folder with files inside, you want to recover all the files in it, specially .hdd and .hds which are the virtual disk file extensions), you might be able to recover your virtual machine(s).

 

Thank you so much Specimen. I was able to install Parallels on my new hard drive and copy the folder with the VM in it over and it worked. Have a good one.