BSOD Troubles with Win XP

Hi,

Overall I really enjoy using Parallels in my Mac, but I do have BSOD crashes about once a day (sometimes more). These crashes disappear so fast because the session reboots almost instantly (can Parallels detect these crashes and pause long enough to read the screen?) that I can hardly read them. One of the errors I see is something like PFN table corrupt, or something similar. I also see some BSOD protection fault style errors.

I am using XP SP1, Parallels build 5584, an a 2.4GHz MacBook with 4GB of RAM. When I bought the machine it had 1GB RAM. I ran right out and bought Parallels so I could run Win XP and Ubuntu. I started getting BSOD crashes with XP right away. I was only able to give Windows XP virtual machines 220MB , so I upgraded to 4GB a couple of days later hoping this would help. It didn't.

So, what should I do? Is it important to be running XP SP2?

Sometimes these crashes happen when I switch back and forth to fullscreen, or if I resize an application on my Windows desktop.

What should I do? Any thoughts?

Thanks,

-Carl Gundel
Easy Windows programming - http://www.libertybasic.com
Easy Web programming - http://www.runbasic.com

 

I forgot to ask a question about these BSOD crashes. Should Windows be performing a CHKDSK when rebooting after these? It never does. How concerned should I be about the integrity of my data?

Thanks again,

-Carl Gundel
Easy Windows programming - http://www.libertybasic.com
Easy Web programming - http://www.runbasic.com

 

Any thoughts on this?

-Carl

 

There's no reason not to run XP SP2.

 

Thanks, but that's not exactly helpful.

I don't want to go through the hassle of upgrading to SP2 (especially since the online update to SP2 hangs right from the start) if it isn't going to fix anything.

-Carl Gundel
http://www.libertybasic.com
http://www.runbasic.com

 

XP SP2 is way more than a service pack, it fixes a lot of things and adds new functionalities, besides, lots of apps nowadays require SP2 as a minimum, heck, even if you want to run Boot Camp Apple requires XP SP2.

In fact, Apple recommends installing XP from a CD already with SP2 on it. And that's the general recommendation, start from scratch with a XP SP2 CD.

I think Parallels recommends XP SP2 too, and that's probably why you're getting the BSODs.

Google for nLite and use it to make a XP SP2 CD from your XP CD and install XP from it.

 

OK thanks.

It would be great to know if SP1 is causing these BSODs, but perhaps nobody knows? Also, when XP crashes and reboots no CHKDSK is performed. Should I be concerned about this?

-Carl Gundel
Easy Windows Programming - http://www.libertybasic.com
Easy Web Programming - http://www.runbasic.com

 

No Check Disk is run because your partition is probably NTFS which means it's a journaled file system which in turn means that all operations to the disk are first logged and then executed, and when they are successful they are then eliminated from the journal, so the journal is basically a checklist of disk operations as a safeguard from incomplete writes (computer shutdowns unexpectedly). That said, if you are suspicious of your system partition health, you can always make CHKDSK run at next boot, by running it from the command line (it says it can't run because the drives is being used, but asks you if you want to run it at next boot).

 

Sometimes BSODs can be caused by USB devices which cannot properly handle power management.
Try to disable power management in Windows and check sometime