Hdd file is missing, corrupted...

I have Win XP installed on external drive in Parallels Desktop 3.0 Build 4128.

Parallels was working fine yesterday, today upon virtual machine startup it says: "Hdd file is missing, corrupted, or used by other application"...

It all started with external drive mounted on a diferent mount point, instead of EXT_DRV, it mounted on EXT_DRV 1. I fixed the mounting problem and then I got the error above.

I tried this solution: http://kb.parallels.com/entry/28/527/, but now when I start the VM it says there's no Operating System installed... and I can't access this drive with Parallels Explorer either.

I cheked the content of my winxp.hdd image and there are 4 files in it, one is xml and 3 are hds one of which has 0 size and other two are ONLY 29MB!! each. This isn't right, since the drive was 108GB yesterday. I have no idea what could have happend....

Is there a way to fix this or atleast recover some files? There are some very important data on the drive.

Thank you,
D.

 

Well, I was able to recover my hdd file and for some time it worked fine, but now when I try to start a VM it offers me to install Windows as if it doesn't recognize that Windows is already installed... Any ideas?

Please help....

 

Please can somebody help? Anyone?

 

The best thing I have found is to go back to your last good backup of the hdd file.