Hung up on: Please wait while the virtual machine is being upgraded...

Please help me! I'm leaving the country Saturday and need my computer for business.
Last night I "upgraded" to Parallels 4.0. Installation seemed fine, but then I was unable to back up to any of my hard drives before converting. I trusted the product and trusted that nothing would go wrong.
Famous last words.
I have been stuck in the process of "Please wait while the virtual machine is being upgraded..."
for 18 hours. I have been kicking myself for installing it for the past 17 1/2 hours.
I'm terrified to turn it off and terrified I'll lose my 42 GB of VM (Windows XP, countless documents)

Does anyone have any suggestions for me? I would be eternally grateful.
Thanks!

 

Please create ticket and post ID here
also I recommend you to call support team, and ask to contact John@Parallels and refer to this forum thread
You need to create ticket in http://www.parallels.com/support/desktop/request/

 

A work around

Mine did the same thing and think I figured out what is wrong.
Apparently windows gets upset with the upgrade from 3.0 to 4.0. Enough data changes that they try to re-authenticate the copy of windows and a dialog box comes up asking permission. Since the conversion of the virtual machine is in automatic mode the box does not come forward. If you switch to manual mode control-alt-command-R the box appears and you can dismiss it. I dismissed it rather than telling it to try to authenticate. This happens in phase 2. and re-occurs in phase 3.
Either the conversion process should be changed to operate in manual mode or the documentation should be modified to alert the user to this solution. There was another box that came up in phase 4 but i forget what it was.

 

Validate upgraded VM??

After waiting for 5 hours I aborted the vm upgrade. I then installed Parallel Tools with no problems. My question is, how do I know if my VM is OK. It seems to run fine. Is there a way to validate my VM?

 

Sometimes upgrade may hangs and after restart upgrade may continue (in your case you was able to install Parallels Tools), and upgrade finished, after that all should work correctly. There is no special parameters for the VM.

You may check performance, correct work of Parallels Tools (mouse, keyboard, coherence, video) and monitor the error messages, if you wont notice them that means upgrade was successful

 

Windows crashed during upgrade to Parallels 4.0 - Please help!

I am trying to upgrade to Parallels 4.0. Everything was going fine until half way through step 2 of converting my VM (Windows XP). It hung up for about an hour in one spot, so I tried switching to Manual Mode by pressing ctrl-alt-cmd-R (per a posted suggestion on this forum) to see if it was hung up and waiting for a command. I found that my OS was stuck in a loop where Windows was continually trying to boot up, getting the Blue Screen of Death, and then automatically rebooting after 30 seconds. I attempted to reboot in Safe Mode and using the Last Known Good Configuration, but the results were the same each time.

I haven't shut down parallels yet. Is there any hope for me?

BTW - I did not back up my OS in 3.0 first because my external hard drive wouldn't allow me to save a single file greater than 4 GB.

 

I'm also curious if other people's upgrade from version 3 to version 4 is okay if you have Mac OS X 10.4.11 Tiger. I have a Macbook (white) with Tiger on it. I'm curious as to whether if version 4 has anything that is worth the upgrade for me. I use XP. Don't plan on using Vista although I tried out Windows7. Also wondering if any particular certain functionality in version 4 requires that you actually need Leopard.

And when people say that version 4 is converting the VM, does that mean that there is a new .hdd file being made and that the old .hdd is then deleted? I ask because my .hdd file is 60 gigabytes in size. (I have it as an always fixed non-expanding size.) And the remaining space on the Mac partition that it's on is 30 gigabytes. I have another partition (with 170 gigabytes available) that I could copy the files to and then do the upgrade to version 4. But I would like to know what is happening with the converting.

 

Hello ruel,
Here you will find all information about new features in Parallels Desktop 4.0 and decide if you wish upgrade or not:

http://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/

According the question about converting:
Parallels Desktop will work with the same .hdd but will convert all folder with VM (Documents -> Parallels-> VM folder ) in one file .pvm

At the beginning it will ask you if you wish to back up and after that convert or if you wish only convert (we recommend our customers to create back up first, you may save the back up file on your extrenal disk to have reserve copy, after convertation yu may remove it). If you select only convert option it does not require additional disk space.

 

This solution (switching to manual mode) saved my butt. Thanks!