Hi, I was playing around with Parallels trying to figure out what it exposes to windows' WMI...and when I tried to query the model and manufacturer from Win32_ComputerSystem on a windows xp installation in parallels, I just got <null> values . Ditto for anything related to Win32_BIOS or any other hardware related queries. Should I be querying something different here? or is it a limitation of parallels posted somewhere ? ~cS
Indeed. Parallels BIOS implementation does not include any model information. It also occasionally incorrectly reports the processor speed. (i've seen it claim that it was a 7ghz process at times for reasons I don't understand.) VMware reports itself as VMWare Virtual Platform instead of passing through. BootCamp EFI->BIOS mapping surprisingly does include all relevant model, manufacturer, and serial number info. I really didn't expect apple to go to the bother, but they did.
As my piano teacher would say... Detail makes perfection, but perfection is no detail. It's really what seperates Apple from the rest.
I guess with this kind of teacher, you're great pianist! However, noone ever noticed WMI output before - i guess this is an issue with one of the BIOS tables. We will investigate.
Just to further this discussion, we have a utility that dumps the first 64k of the bios and extracts varios bits of data, including the serial number, asset tag, manufacturer, etc. This should be the same as what is in wmi. When we run this utility from a dos shell, we get the following error: "Warning: The BIOS doesn't contain the necessary plug and play header. This header is required for Serial Number Scanner/DMIBIOS Function call support; however, it is not required for Table support." This happens on both xp and 2003 running in Parallels. Just as a side note, this utility does work correctly in vmware's fusion. Thanks, doug
I just dumped the first 64kb of the parallels bios. Not much there except for a reference to "tinyBIOS V1.3a". A search for 'tinybios' finds the following url, which describes tinybios as follows: "tinyBIOS™ was designed from the ground up for embedded PC applications such as network appliances. It is designed for easy adaptation and simple code. Features not needed or desired for embedded use have been left out." Source: http://www.pcengines.ch/tinybios.htm
