Disk read error - Parallels 5
I'm completely new to this forum, and realize that I'm posting related to P5 rather than P6, but given the appropriateness of the thread title, didn't want to just launch off and create a new one and look like I hadn't tried to find something related. Apologies in advance, and if I should just create a new thread and edit this response out, someone please let me know.
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I am unable to start my primary VM, getting a pop-up error message "Unable to delete the snapshot / An error occurred while reading the disk." This is a critical problem for me, and any help would be greatly appreciated!!! I am apt to be forced to proceed to purchasing support, but community help would be great. Thanks in advance.
I filed a problem report yesterday (12/16/11) which has iD 11726513, but I just generated a new problem report [11734561] because I realized that I had relocated the log and snapshot information during debugging and they might not have been included.
I am running Parallels 5 on a mid-2010 i5 iMac with 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD.
The configuration has been running fine for months and months. The VM is 3GB RAM, 256MB video. Disk size is (I think) 200GB. OS is Win7. I am not using File Vault and am not backing up the virtual machine files with Time Machine. I should note that I =can= start and successfully use a separate VM (which unfortunately does NOT include my critical data -- Murphy's Law), so I'm workng on the assumption that the problem is probably with the HDD file or associated state information rather than with Parallels itself. Since I can't get as far as booting the VM, I haven't tried the bootrec tip -- I'm getting the impression that I need to change the boot order for the VM, then boot from a W7 installation CD and go from there. Confirmation of that (which may be intuitively obvious to everyone else) would be appreciated.
Settings did include snapshots every 2 hours, limit of 10, and there were 10. Based on much Google searching (and being unable to find anything in the forums, to which I am new), I've tried turning off snapshots, increasing the number allowed so that it shouldn't be trying to delete one, temporarily relocating the snapshots.xml and snapshots folder to the desktop. (All with quitting and restarting parallels itself.) As a result of this thread, I also tried the boot flag suggestion. None of these helped. I also encountered the same error trying to delete the oldest snapshot. Trying to restore to a prior snapshot produces an error message that "An error occurred while reading the disk."
There was a suggestion somewhere that this message could result from running out of space on the Mac disk itself. I have nearly 70GB free, which is more than what is displayed as the minimum required to make a snapshot.