Hosed? Finder can't complete operation because some data in xxx.pvm can't be r/w

I'm having a slow melt down of Parallels on my MacBook Pro using Mountain Lion.

At first it was slowing way down and couldn't find the network, so I ran disk utility on everything, then tried Parallels Tools reinstall, no luck.

I then decided to try an old copy (two weeks old) of my .PVM Parallels file. Using copy or migrate from my USB drive, it won't copy the old .PVM file and access it. I get the following message, "Finder can't complete operation because some data in xxx.pvm can't be read or written. Error code - 36"

Any thoughts or am I hosed?

 

Hi,

I looked up a knowledge base article about error code 36 for you http://kb.parallels.com/en/7096.

Also did you remove your original .pvm from your computer, or is it still there?

 

Hi,

I solved the -36 issue. It was a bad external WD Book Hard Drive.

I keep all Windows work files on an external USB WD book drive.
The WD drive was going bad. As it did, it corrupted the Parallels Windows environment on the iMac Hard Drive. So the iMac .PVM file was getting corrupted. The bad thing is the Mac "-36" error code is not well documented on Mac Support Forum, and shows up while the drive is going bad, but typically first on large files. You can try to repair the hard drive, and I tried, but you're basically hosed. It's a matter of when it will totally fail, not if. So my smaller work files were still good. I didn't notice the problem for weeks. Nothing on the Mac was flagging it. The only thing you saw was that Parallels starts slowing down, as well as large copies from the WD drive, e.g. directories of scanned tax receipts and .PVM from the WD drive to iMac HDD. My archives of the Parallels .PVM environment files had been going bad for almost a month. They had been "stored" on Time Machine as partial files.

Once I figured it out, I spent a day getting what recent work files I could off the WD drive. Then I went back a month in Time Machine and restored clean files, including a clean .PVM file. and replaced the .PVM file on the iMac drive. I'm back in operation again.

 

I was getting this error when using a Thunderbolt connection to copy some PVM files from my MacBook to an iMac. I rebooted my MacBook (actually both machines) and after re-establishing the connection, I was able to transfer the files just fine. Something must have had a hold on the files even though Parallels wasn't running and I had "shut down" the guest OSes. Just a thought, YMMV.