Error Setting up Parallels

NickA3 · Dec 11, 2017

Hello there

I bought Paralells some time ago and always experienced an error when trying to set it up.
I only get as far as to the window where it tries to create the parallel but it always returns this error: Error:
PRL_ERR_DISK_INVALID_BLOCKSIZE (0x80021009) Path: '/Users/NickArt/Parallels/Eigenes Boot Camp
Does anybody have an idea on how this could be? Write access should be no issue as I'm running NTFS to be able to write on my Windows and definetly not the mac partition I am currently running. I tried different paths and places nothing works. Any ideas`

Dmitry Geynisman · Dec 12, 2017

NickA3 said:
Hello there

I bought Paralells some time ago and always experienced an error when trying to set it up.
I only get as far as to the window where it tries to create the parallel but it always returns this error: Error:
PRL_ERR_DISK_INVALID_BLOCKSIZE (0x80021009) Path: '/Users/NickArt/Parallels/Eigenes Boot Camp
Does anybody have an idea on how this could be? Write access should be no issue as I'm running NTFS to be able to write on my Windows and definetly not the mac partition I am currently running. I tried different paths and places nothing works. Any ideas`

Hello @NickA3, can you please send us a technical report once the error appears the next time? Go to Help menu > Send Technical Data... Please post the report ID here.

NickA3 · Jan 13, 2018

Dmitry@Parallels said:
Hello @NickA3, can you please send us a technical report once the error appears the next time? Go to Help menu > Send Technical Data... Please post the report ID here.

ID-Nummer 236282567
PS: I cant seem to activate my key in my profile: It says it has already been registered. Is this maybe because I bought parallels over my university?

NickA3 · Feb 13, 2018

Dmitry@Parallels said:
Hello @NickA3, can you please send us a technical report once the error appears the next time? Go to Help menu > Send Technical Data... Please post the report ID here.

Any news on this?

Dmitry Geynisman · Feb 13, 2018

NickA3 said:
Any news on this?

Hi @NickA3, sorry for the delay. I've reported this to Engineering Team, they are working on a fix. Am I right that your Boot Camp is installed on a secondary internal 4 TB disk?

NickA3 · Feb 13, 2018

Dmitry@Parallels said:
Hi @NickA3, sorry for the delay. I've reported this to Engineering Team, they are working on a fix. Am I right that your Boot Camp is installed on a secondary internal 4 TB disk?

That is not quite correct: The Bootcamp is on the only internal disk: (partitioned into two pieces) with 512GB space. The partition with windows is named „Windoge" and is about 95-100GB in size while the mac partition is 399GB in size. Everything named EHD, Share or NAS would be external hard drives or connected servers. Please let me know if you need additional information.

Dmitry Geynisman · Feb 14, 2018

NickA3 said:
That is not quite correct: The Bootcamp is on the only internal disk: (partitioned into two pieces) with 512GB space. The partition with windows is named „Windoge" and is about 95-100GB in size while the mac partition is 399GB in size. Everything named EHD, Share or NAS would be external hard drives or connected servers. Please let me know if you need additional information.

So, the disk ST5000DX000-1H2170 (mounted as disk1) where Boot Camp is installed is not an internal disk, right? Currently we do not support such type of Boot Camp configurations, unfortunately (the ones installed on a disk other from macOS installation). macOS is booted from APPLE SSD SM0512F (disk0).

NickA3 · Feb 14, 2018

Dmitry@Parallels said:
So, the disk ST5000DX000-1H2170 (mounted as disk1) where Boot Camp is installed is not an internal disk, right? Currently we do not support such type of Boot Camp configurations, unfortunately (the ones installed on a disk other from macOS installation). macOS is booted from APPLE SSD SM0512F (disk0).

Okay I think we are misunderstanding us here:
Disk ST5000DX000-1H2170 is my 5TB external HDD.
Bootcamp is not installed on this disk.
Bootcamp is however installed on the internal disk: Apple SSD SM0512F

Her an image of Windoge (my bootcamp partition) that shows it installed on disk0s3.

disk0s1 would be Macintosh HD, disk0s2 Recovery HD, disk03s is Windoge (Bootcamp) and disk0s4 (no name) is the recovery partition of windows.

The internal disk is even stated in the error code I constantly receive:
Error: PRL_ERR_DISK_INVALID_BLOCKSIZE (0x80021009)

Path: '/Users/NickArt/Parallels/Eigenes Boot Camp.pvm/APPLE SSD SM0512F (disk0).hdd'

Dmitry Geynisman · Feb 15, 2018

NickA3 said:
Okay I think we are misunderstanding us here:
Disk ST5000DX000-1H2170 is my 5TB external HDD.
Bootcamp is not installed on this disk.
Bootcamp is however installed on the internal disk: Apple SSD SM0512F

Her an image of Windoge (my bootcamp partition) that shows it installed on disk0s3.
View attachment 13617
disk0s1 would be Macintosh HD, disk0s2 Recovery HD, disk03s is Windoge (Bootcamp) and disk0s4 (no name) is the recovery partition of windows.

The internal disk is even stated in the error code I constantly receive:
Error: PRL_ERR_DISK_INVALID_BLOCKSIZE (0x80021009)

Path: '/Users/NickArt/Parallels/Eigenes Boot Camp.pvm/APPLE SSD SM0512F (disk0).hdd'

Thank you, Nick! Looks like we fail to read disk partition table. Need your help to get disk.bin file to analyze properly how your disk is partitioned. Please help us with this, I will send you a personal message with instructions.

Dmitry Geynisman · Feb 16, 2018

@NickA3, our Engineering Team analyzed your disk, it's formatted uncommonly - there's legacy MBR with no GPT/EFI partition + there's no partition with GPT+EFI type (hybrid MBR), which is likely means that the disk was formatted not by Boot Camp Assistant (by Windows?). Unfortunately, Parallels Desktop does not support such disk configurations. My personal advice is to use Parallels Transported Agent and migrate this Windows installation to a standalone virtual machine, or reinstall Boot Camp using Apple's Boot Camp Assistant.

NickA3 · Feb 20, 2018

Dmitry@Parallels said:
@NickA3, our Engineering Team analyzed your disk, it's formatted uncommonly - there's legacy MBR with no GPT/EFI partition + there's no partition with GPT+EFI type (hybrid MBR), which is likely means that the disk was formatted not by Boot Camp Assistant (by Windows?). Unfortunately, Parallels Desktop does not support such disk configurations. My personal advice is to use Parallels Transported Agent and migrate this Windows installation to a standalone virtual machine, or reinstall Boot Camp using Apple's Boot Camp Assistant.

Huh, that is indeed weird since I did install windows with my bootcamp assistant. I have however noticed some time ago that something in the disk set up must have changes as I was not able to updtae my mac software onwards from El Capitan. I got a message claiming my disk was not properly set up in OS-Extended (Journaled). Any idea what could have caused this? And is there a way to solve this without me having to wipe either Macintosh and Windows?
Hmpf, this sucks indeed as I have certain program and folder structures on windows that took ages to set up and I'm not in the mood to set them up again. (I already had to reset them up once and it took me months). Will Parallels Transport Agent allow me to take the current porgrams, installation set ups and structures over?

Dmitry Geynisman · Feb 21, 2018

NickA3 said:
Huh, that is indeed weird since I did install windows with my bootcamp assistant. I have however noticed some time ago that something in the disk set up must have changes as I was not able to updtae my mac software onwards from El Capitan. I got a message claiming my disk was not properly set up in OS-Extended (Journaled). Any idea what could have caused this? And is there a way to solve this without me having to wipe either Macintosh and Windows?
Hmpf, this sucks indeed as I have certain program and folder structures on windows that took ages to set up and I'm not in the mood to set them up again. (I already had to reset them up once and it took me months). Will Parallels Transport Agent allow me to take the current porgrams, installation set ups and structures over?

Frankly, we're out of ideas why your Boot Camp was installed with legacy BIOS if it's Windows 10. How long ago did you install Boot Camp?
Theoretically, there is a way to fix this, but please note that it's not 100% going to work and I strongly recommend you making a full backup of your Mac and Windows before you proceed. So the goal is to create a hybrid MBR/GPT for Mac disk. There is a tool for that: https://sourceforge.net/projects/gptfdisk/, but honestly, I have never done it myself. The instuctions are here: http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/hybrid.html

Answering the question about Parallels Transported Agent, yes this tool will create an exact copy of your Boot Camp Windows as a virtual environment with all your programs and files. I suggest to give it a try first:
1. Boot to Windows in Boot Camp
2. Install Parallels Transporter Agent
3. Obtain an external NTFS disk. Run a migration to external drive
4. Boot to Mac, copy created virtual machine from external drive to Mac disk
5. Open the virtual machine with Parallels Desktop, install Parallels Tools. Make sure everything works as it supposed to.
6. At the same time, your Boot Camp partition will remain unmodified. You can try converting Mac partition table to hybrid MBR/GPT if you'd like to give it a try. But please keep in mind that Parallels is not responsible for the consequences.

NickA3 · Apr 2, 2019

Hey Dmitry! Long time no see!

As I was busy with work and didn't want to risk anything happening to my computer at that time I jsut let the issue rest. However, today I have followed your advice to used the gdisk software to create a hybrid MBR, and it worked fine for my mac OS partition as it now shows itself as GUID partition again and Parallels managed to finally detect and install, but there were also some unwanted side effects.
The first being that despite the hard drive now being formated correctly macos does not want to update the software because of a missing firmware partition (wth?):

(Installation on this volume is not possible, because the computer is missing a firmware partition), whatever that means.

The second being that the bootcamp partition, well, it didn't take it too well:

Furthermore while Parallels seems to have isntalled correctly I think it got confused and tried to install both a windows and macos parallels, both of which are currently failing to work because of obvious reasons:
Windows Parallels:

MacOS Parallels:

Bildschirmfoto 2019-04-02 um 13.27.03.png

I will now try to first work around on how to solve that missing firmware partition problem and then look on how I can repair my bootcamp partition. One step at a time, but at least getting my OSX partition back to showing as GUID again was a huge leap already so thanks for that!

I just wanted to let you know how it worked out and that there are some minor side effects to doing that.

Cheers

Nick

Dmitry Geynisman · Apr 2, 2019

NickA3 said:
Hey Dmitry! Long time no see!

As I was busy with work and didn't want to risk anything happening to my computer at that time I jsut let the issue rest. However, today I have followed your advice to used the gdisk software to create a hybrid MBR, and it worked fine for my mac OS partition as it now shows itself as GUID partition again and Parallels managed to finally detect and install, but there were also some unwanted side effects.
The first being that despite the hard drive now being formated correctly macos does not want to update the software because of a missing firmware partition (wth?):
View attachment 14788
(Installation on this volume is not possible, because the computer is missing a firmware partition), whatever that means.

The second being that the bootcamp partition, well, it didn't take it too well: View attachment 14785

Furthermore while Parallels seems to have isntalled correctly I think it got confused and tried to install both a windows and macos parallels, both of which are currently failing to work because of obvious reasons:
Windows Parallels:
View attachment 14786
MacOS Parallels:
View attachment 14787

I will now try to first work around on how to solve that missing firmware partition problem and then look on how I can repair my bootcamp partition. One step at a time, but at least getting my OSX partition back to showing as GUID again was a huge leap already so thanks for that!

I just wanted to let you know how it worked out and that there are some minor side effects to doing that.

Cheers

Nick

Thanks for the update, Nick.