solved for me
I had this exact problem, I thought it was due to running a disk compress (which deleted the disk somehow! back up disks before doing compress y'all out there) but I don't think that had anything to do with it.
I was remote desktopped into Windows running Parallels Workstation. But I was not running from the /admin (or in older versions /console) session. So every single VM I tried gave me this critical error. But then when I logged in to Session 0 with "hostname /admin", I was able to start up my VMs. (my host computer is Windows 2003 server, VMs are Windows 7, 8, Centos, Fedora, Ubuntu, XP, etc
(This took me a while to figure out, because I often administer my VMs in a non-admin session using Parallels Workstation client, after they were already started by the admin session...)
Last edited: Feb 14, 2013