Boot Camp & Parallels Tools with v. 3186

masonjames · Feb 28, 2007

Pretty sweet, for the most part! I've got my boot camp partition up and running in parallels and everything seems fine, but I have 2 questions.

First, I have not found the Parallels boot camp tools for windows xp with this newest version. Everything seems to be running fine without them though, and so I'm wondering why I had them in the first place. I was previously running the RC3 version of parallels and uninstalled the tools on my boot camp drive before upgrading to the latest release. Now I don't have them at all. Problem? I dunno.

Second, normally, when I load up my mac, I see my boot camp partition as a separate hard drive which I have labeled 'windows xp. When I run parallels this partition disappears. Of course, I guess I don't actually need it since I am actually running it at the same time, but I'm just curious to see if this is normal. As you can tell, I'm a bit of a newbie. Thanks in advance for your help and insight! Love the program!

snodman · Feb 28, 2007

If you somehow hosed your Parallels Tools and there is no yellow bow tie Parallels thing in your running programs drawer you can always get the new tools to install by starting up a Parallels session and after Windows has finished loading use the Parallels pulldown menu under 'Actions' to 'Install Parallels Tools'.

simibilly@mac.com · Feb 28, 2007

I'm very dissapointed in the time it takes to start my XP VM. Besides having to log in with my admin password twice, I continue to see the warning about Tools initializing for about two minutes beforeXP is finally launched. Is this normal for a VM using my Boot Camp installation?

ericgonzaga · Mar 5, 2007

i agree with simibilly. while a favorite feature is using a boot camp partition, it really is a painful process to start up. it would be great to just leave windows running all the time but on a macbook pro, it uses way too much processing power so this is not currently an option. so why does desktop require an admin password twice-- no explanation is given and why must it install tools every time!?! anyone care to share their experiences?

Gannet · Mar 5, 2007

I've only ever been asked for the admin password once whenever I start it up and I assume this is to allow it access to the boot camp partition. As for the tools, note it does not mention 'installing' anywhere but instead 'initialising'. So the tools are already installed, it just has to initialise them every time. Why? Probably because it has to, um, deinitialise them every time you shut down else they might interfere with boot camp when you boot it up natively.
But it isn't the lengthy startup that I particularly mind, it's the much higher resource usage of the boot camp VM versus a normal VM. Other apps are practically impossible to use whenever the boot camp VM is running.

And to answer one of the first questions, yes it is normal for Parallels to unmount the windows partition on your desktop when you start it up. However I don't see any reason for this if the format is NTFS, since NTFS is read-only in OS X.

(I should note I'm still running RC3 - will update sometime when I get around to it)

simibilly@mac.com · Mar 5, 2007

Yes, you are asked for your admin password twice on launch and once when shutting down. Doesn't make any sense to me. As for initializing Parallels tools, I guess this is due to using the Boot Camp VM and I can live with that until Parallels gets around to implementing accelerated 3D graphics which will allow me to dump Boot Camp alltogether.

rekoil · Mar 10, 2007

Gannet said:
But it isn't the lengthy startup that I particularly mind, it's the much higher resource usage of the boot camp VM versus a normal VM. Other apps are practically impossible to use whenever the boot camp VM is running.

I noticed this the first time I ran Parallels, and figured out that the main reason for this is that Parallels marks its memory footprint as "wired" memory, which OS X can't swap to disk. This is why it requires the admin password (only processes running as root can do this), and why other applications run slower - they're forced to share whatever memory is left, which usually isn't very much. The solution for me was to reduce the VM's memory usage (from 512M to 256M, which may or may not work for you) and to also install more memory in my Macbook (which costs $$).

tomquinlan · Mar 13, 2007

Say it ain't so!

Somebody please tell me that double Authentication with password isn't normal. I know I have had a configuration of XP running from the Bootcamp partition that did not do this in the past. Now I have a customer where this is happening and she has a LOOONG password which makes this admin password twice thing horrible.

[email protected] said:
Yes, you are asked for your admin password twice on launch and once when shutting down. Doesn't make any sense to me. As for initializing Parallels tools, I guess this is due to using the Boot Camp VM and I can live with that until Parallels gets around to implementing accelerated 3D graphics which will allow me to dump Boot Camp alltogether.