Over the past several days I have been struggling with corrupt virtual machines. Once corrupt the only thing I can do is delete them and reinstall the VM from the beginning. I am using Parallels 3188. After a fresh install of Windows XP (w/SP2) in a VM (using default settings - except only 256MB ram) everything looks good. No errors. I then proceed to visit Windows Update and install all the updates. Again everything looks fine. However, when the VM restarts there will be many chkdsk errors or a blue screen of death (too fast to see the error). Either it will BSOD or eventually generate various errors and simply not start. As a lesson learned I've now started using the clone feature in Parallels to copy the VM between reboots and allow me to save time by simply reverting to a previous image. Even this has proved problematic. My cloned images even get corrupt before I've had a chance to use them and have to start all over from the beginning. What is causing all of this corruption? By the way, I'm using a MacBook w/1GB RAM.
One could sure wish that the recent builds were more stable than this. Version 1970 seems to be very stable for me. It´s the first version I tried and I bounced back to it as soon as I´d tried 3186. If I really had to run Windows XP, I´d use Boot Camp. How well does XP run in 1970?(Just curious...)
Are you installing Parallels Tools B4 running windows updates? If not then this could cause windows to try to load windows drivers which can currupt the VM.
