Yesterday while upgrading to Mac OS X 10.5.1 I had a partial disk failure. This was fixed and the upgrade completed successfully - but only after reformatting and isolating bad blocks. Fortunately, most critical files were backed-up but the applications folder for Parallels was not one.
I still had my original download and the recent upgrade to 3.0 build 5582. I had to do the 2.5 install first to have my activation recognized. Then I did the 3.0 installation successfully.
My virtual machine directory was stored on a separate disk. So it was a simple matter to choose it when first starting Parallels. Or, so it would seem. It wasn't that simple. After just a second, or two, I got the following error message:
Virtual machine cannot be started because of the following problem:
File /Volumes/168 GB HD/Parallels/XPfromDVD-Don/winxp.hdd seems to be not a regular file and cannot be used as a hard disk image.
My suspicion is that it has something to do with the file having being started and updated while I was running Tiger 10.4 and now it is trying to work in Leopard 10.5. That is the only change from the last time that it worked and now. The last date on time on winxp,hdd is 7:18 a.m December 26, 2007 - which when I last used Parallels.
When I was exploring the folder to give the date and time data in the above paragraph, I inadvertently clicked on the file name and it mounted as a drive and I looked at it with Finder and it is everything that I last had in the VM that I was using. So apparently the file is still valid but must have some identity problem in the new scheme of things.
I recognized that Parallels runs on Leopard with the caveat "Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) is supported experimentally." But, with that said, I'm sure that opening the VM that was active in 10.4 should not be a problem.
Can anyone help with this dilemma?
After posting this, I uninstalled 3.0 and re-installed 2.5 to determine if the winxp.hdd file would be seen by the former version (slim chance since last access/writing was in 3.0 - but in desperation one should attempt most anything). As you might guess, the same error message popped-up.
So my plea for help still stands !!!!
Last edited: Dec 28, 2007
