Cannot reinstall Parallels

Hello,

I am running Windows XP from my Boot Camp partition under Mac OS 10.5.1. Today I got a kernel panic while using Parallels, and then was unable to start my Virtual Machine due to the

ntoskrnl.exe

file missing. The same message came up booting under Boot Camp. I tried turning Spaces on and off, as suggested elsewhere, but without success. After being unable to boot from my Windows XP CD-ROM under Parallels, the ntoskrnl.exe file was restored booting the Windows XP CD-ROM under Boot Camp. After all this, I was still unable to boot into my Virtual Machine because I got the message that my ntoskrnl.exe was still missing. I can use Windows XP fine under Boot Camp now, but not under Parallels.

I then proceeded to uninstall Parallels, and now I cannot reinstall any versions of Parallels - 5160, 5580, nor 5582. I tried someone else's suggestion of typing these commands in Terminal, but was unsuccessful.

Now, I don't know what to do. My postgraduate research depends on using Windows, and I had abort my research today due to this mishap. I guess I can always boot natively using Boot Camp, but this is inconvenient. I would like to restore Parallels usage as soon as possible. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you in advance.

 

Hello again,

After three hours of random tinkering (http://kb.parallels.com/entry/21/235/), I could get Build 5580 installed, but only after force-quitting the application when the progress bar had almost completed. The Terminal commands to force the installation to proceed were unsuccessful. Is there any harm in this kind of installation process?

I've got my Windows XP Virtual Machine working again under Build 5580. I'd like to use Build 5582, as I am running Mac OS 10.5.1, but my force-quit installation procedure above isn't successful for this build.

I've lost six hours of work today, and this kind of thing has happened before where I was up all night trying to make my Boot Camp-partition Windows XP work under Parallels. If I have mission-critical academic thesis work on Parallels, should I seriously consider using an .hdd instead?