Useless Boot Camp installation and non-functional Parallels after 5584 install

I just spent an evening trying to complete a virgin install of V3.0 build 5584 of Parallels on my iMac running 10.5.2. It was nothing short of a disaster.

Installation and activation of the Parallels program took about 2 minutes. Very smooth. Initial launch of Parallels detected my Boot Camp installation of WinXP_SP2 and I selected that as my Virtual Machine. I then told it to start the machine and waited for the system to recognize the mouse and keyboard after a short delay. The system never progressed beyond a black screen. I stopped the VM and restarted it. This time I noticed the Windows XP splash screen and about the time I expected the login screen to appear, I got... nothing.

Uninstalled the program and deleted the Parallels directory in my Documents folder.

I then tried to reinstall the program. This time, when I launched Parallels for the "first" time, there was no recognition of my Boot Camp partition. Uh-oh.

Rebooted directly from my Boot Camp partition using the Option key, saw a brief screen indicating it was trying to boot from Parallels, and then got an error message about <windows root>\system32\hal.dll being missing.

Figured I'd outsmart it by quickly selecting the Boot Camp WinXP installation upon rebooting and get around this error. Managed to select the Boot Camp installation, but the boot never got to the login screen, even when I started in Safe Mode (hung while displaying the MUP.dll file, I think it was).

So, I now have a totally FUBAR windows installation. I guess I can't say I wasn't warned when I quit the Virtual Machine launch that Boot Camp could be corrupted, but it's still a VERY disappointing first experience.

At this point, I'm just hoping to rid my machine of this software and never see it again. Does anyone have any helpful hints or links to basic instructions for restoring my Boot Camp installation (I'm not very experienced at repairing Windows installations)? I have a complete Retrospect backup of the files from last night but I've already had problems getting the windows side of the system to recognize my Retrospect Disaster recovery disk.

Oh, one last question, why does the system attempt to boot from something called "Parallels (something)" when I've uninstalled the program? What file is telling it to do that?

Alan

 

Your boot.ini is corrupted.
Had the same problem bevor and a windows geek repaired it.
Since then I have a copy of boot.ini for spare.

 

Thanks for the reply. I was able to find a lot of info on the web on how to repair this. There is a knowledge base topic that appears to be an exact match:

http://kb.parallels.com/entry/65/336/

Unfortunately, there is one aspect of the repair that I don't understand. After repairing the WinXP installation, I'm supposed to start Windows in the Virtual Machine (presumably after I attempt a Parallels reinstallation) and re-install Parallels Tools. I never got a chance to do that on my initial installation. As I interpreted the instructions, one is supposed to do that AFTER booting up Windows. As I never got that far on my initial attempt, why should I expect it to do so on a 2nd try?

ABG