Unable to boot to USB media

Using Parallels 11:

I've got bootable USB media - thumb drive, CD-R and DVD-R - created on PC by an imaging product, for Windows system recovery from image. The media work perfectly on the PC. It doesn't work when trying to boot a VM from external media in Parallels.

I recreated the media from the same imaging product running inside the VM. It still can't boot to the VM, but I can boot my physical PC from it.

Perhaps I don't have the correct boot settings for my Parallels VM. I've tried a few.

Hardware | Boot Order - I've moved External device to the top, I've set the external boot device to the specific device (the thumb drive or the Superdrive), I've tried setting Select boot device on startup both on and off.

I get different errors depending on what I set. If I have it set to select boot device at startup, I get a numbered menu, to select from Floppy drive, SATA drive 1, SATA optical drive 2, or networking.

If I select SATA optical drive 2, I get the message:

Trying to boot from SATA optical drive 2 ... SATA optical drive 2 failed.

Eventually it will stop waiting and boot straight to the hard drive.

After that, the drive will still show up as a data drive in the VM. So - it is able to access the drive. It just can't boot from it.

Any thoughts?

Thank you.

 

Hello IraF,
Are you trying to install or create Windows 10 virtual machine using a Microsoft USB installation stick? also, we need you to submit a Problem Report and provide us with its ID number. Please follow this KB article to submit Problem Report: http://kb.parallels.com/9058

 

Thank you, Manu.

I will try to capture data for a Problem Report - is that possible while booting? Most of the time I am not able to use the mouse or keyboard at all while booting, whether I press CTRL ALT or not.

This is not a Windows 10 issue, and is not an install issue.

I have a virtual machine running Windows 7 that was migrated from a PC using Parallels Transporter Agent, and am trying to boot its VM, for recovery purposes, from USB, to recover images made using a very efficient and powerful imaging process running inside the Windows 7 VM, called Macrium Reflect.

My VM is around 150 GB. It was a program only migration, so I don't know why it is this big. Almost none of it is listed as reclaimable space.

If you use Time Machine or any of the popular cloning programs for Mac - like like Carbon Copy Cloner or Superduper - then you have to be sure to close the VM before they execute. This means the backup process cannot be unattended - you must pay attention. Even if you manage to close the VM manually each time, every clone or copy of the VM will be of its entire contents, rapidly filling a Time Machine disk, or filling a Carbon Copy's "safety folder" of older modified copies of changed files. If the VM is open during any backup or cloning period, the backup of it may be corrupt. So I want to use a more reliable backup strategy like the one I used for my actual PC.

Macrium Reflect can restore an entire image to a drive by booting to USB flash, CD or DVD, loading a small version of the Windows OS (called WinPE) and the Reflect recovery program, and restoring the image to the drive. The advantage of this Windows imager is it can back up an entire system safely even when files are open, using a Windows feature called VSS. It can make compressed encrypted images very quickly, and it can make very small incremental images. Even a full image compresses to around 50% of my file system size, and incremental images of my full 250 GB PC file system are just 1.5 GB. All of these features make it superior to any backup process I have yet found available for Mac.

I don't know yet if this kind of image restore is possible on a Parallels VM, but if I can't boot the recovery media, I can't proceed to test further.

I hope this clarifies what I am trying to do.

Thank you.

 

I have finally gotten it to boot to USB flash drive!

It will not boot to CD.

When I insert CD, it appears in Finder. When I start VM, CD is ejected. I reinsert CD.

The behavior then varies depending on how many devices I allow it to boot from, and whether or not I enable the choice to select boot device on startup.

If I only have CD/DVD selected in Boot order, with External boot device set to Superdrive, and Select boot device on startup unchecked, I get these results:

Network bootrom is installed.
Trying to boot from SATA optional drive 2... SATA optical drive 2 failed.
No boot device is available, press Enter to continue.

If I press Enter, this just repeats.

The CD will appear as a regular data drive if I leave Hard Disk 1 as an option in the Boot order. It is just not being recognized at VM boot time.

 

Problem Report ID is 80565630

Since it says I won't receive a reply, do I need to open a tech support incident?

Thank you.

 

Is there a next step for me?

 

As I understood you were not able to boot from CD drive connected to VM as USB device (specified in external device field). And you were able to boot from USB disk (flash drive).
So, from this point of view no additional steps are possible, just because of conventional BIOS (i.e. non UEFI) used with this VM is not able to boot from USB CD/DVD drives.
If you want to boot from your CD/DVD drive, just connect it to VM as physical CD/DVD drive, not as USB (external) device. In this case "Trying to boot from SATA optical drive 2 " will succeed.

 

Thank you PaulChris and mmika. I updated Parallels Desktop, and was able to update Tools only in the VMs I had created with Windows OS. I have a few of those. If I booted to this alternate OS, I could not update Tools using any of the normal or the advanced methods.

In any event, the problem is not just booting. If I boot to USB stick, or boot to a recovery boot option that is in my boot menu on the virtual hard drive .HDD file, I load to a mini-Windows OS and a recovery tool; that tool is unable to see the external USB hard drive that stores my backup images. If I boot the VM normally to Windows 7, I can read and write to the external USB hard drive just fine - I have made backups to it. The USB hard drive is visible to Windows in 3 ways - as a mounted drive in My Computer, and through the Network via 2 different Mac paths. So: Parallels is able to see this USB hard drive ordinarily and share it with Windows 7.

But the recovery program running in the mini-OS is never able to see that same USB hard drive through My Computer or the network. If I drill down into network - the network is empty. It seems that Parallel tools is not operating in this mini-OS environment, so the OS is unable to see the drive. Or, I have to use some other features; there are a number of different network modes. It could also be a problem with the mini-OS, which has a minimal number of drivers installed, and may require more.

I will try what mmika suggests to see if I can then boot from my Superdrive USB CD/DVD. It would be great if I could; but whether or not I can boot to CD, I still have the problem of accessing the USB where the recovery data is.

I hope that is making sense! In other words - I have 2 separate problems:

1. Boot from CD
2. Once booted, see the USB external hard drive.

Also - as of today, the boot to USB stick stopped working . I imagine I'll get that working again somehow.

 

IraF, for me parallels tools is not related to your issues at all.
If you a want to see your USB stick as network drive this can be done by shared folders feature of parallels tools. But it works only in primary guest os, i.e. that is not in recovery mode. It won't work for windows safe mode as well (AFAIK). Also it won't work in your mini-OS. The only way to see your USB stick in mini-OS is to have proper USB EHCI and XHCI drivers. From this point of view, I would suggest to disable USB 3.0 support for this VM in order to get your stick connected to virtual EHCI controller and the most likely your mini-OS has drivers for intel's EHCI USB controller.

 

Good ideas. I'm going to try that out.

When the boot media is created, there are default drivers included, but you can add others.\

My mini-OS loads just these drivers:

Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller
DW1501 Wireless-N WLAN Half-Mini card
Intel 5 series 6 port SATA AHCI controller
Intel 5 series/3400 series chipset family usb enhanced host controller - 3834
Intel 5 series/3400 series chipset family usb enhanced host controller - 383C

Thats' it. Normally, that is sufficient to read an external USB hard drive connected to a real machine, or a VM booted to a full Windows install.

 

JFYI: parallels VM emulates Intel82801 - 256C usb enhanced host controller
and intel e1000 network adapter. And these drivers are absent in your list.
Also, you may get some BSOD in iastor.sys (as I suppose used for Intel 5 series 6 port SATA AHCI controller). I'd suggest to add to this list msahci or ahcistor drivers by Microsoft.

 

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm trying to get info from the builders of the recovery software how to include those drivers when building the WinPE recovery media.