Parallels damaged my hard disc

After using the new beta5 for some minutes and going back to the Finder I discovered that several files and folders had disappeared (possibly after having activated shared folders, but I'm not sure about this). Dock (and other) Prefs were deleted.
Disk Utility had volume and other errors to repair. I'd say there's a serious bug there…

 

And did you opened access to it from guest via Shared Folders? Did you have kind of crash or no?

 

I didn't have the time to test folder sharing, after activating it, selecting a folder in the prefs and starting XP I went to the Finder. When I left full screen mode, the dock had changed position and lost its content. When I opened my home folder, the library folder was empty. I couldn't restart, had to force a reboot and after that running disk utility showed my that a lot of things were wrong with my disk

 

This sounds similar to what I posted yesterday:

"I successfully installed beta 3 on my iMac last week installed Win XP Pro, and then updated Perallels to beta 4. Last night, Win XP refused to run, returning to the Parallels configuration window immediately after loading.

I trashed the Parallels folder, which led to weird Finder behavior. Disk Utility found multiple errors, which were fixed. I then re-installed beta 4 and Win XP, which ran fine this morning. This evening, with no intervening activiy, the VM is gone - the Parallels folder is empty. (I'd done a save state before shutting down the Mac this morning.) Everything else is running fine."

I've since installed beta 5, which seems to be working properly after one kernel panic.

 

This is a symptom of a hard drive on the verge of failure. (Dock moves mysteriously, dock changes back to it's default config.) I've seen this happen way before Parallels was released. Back up your entire volume as soon as possible.

While it's possible for software to delete files, it's not possible for software to cause your hard drive to crash. I wouldn't blame Parallels. The fact that it happened while installing/using it is a coincidence (I've seen this happen after installing Apple Remote Desktop).

 

Possible, but as these are all Intel Macs, this is a relatively new hard drive. There haven't been a lot of reports of the iMac Intels or MBPs experiencing hard disk failure. Still, of course anything that happens while running a beta will initially be blamed on the beta.

For what it's worth, I experienced similar problems under Beta 2 after a particular kernel panic, and my hard disk is fine. I do suspect that this problem is a weird manifestation triggered by Parallels.

 

I too have had identical issues. However my MacBook Pro would not even boot after I hard reset it. While I was thinking imminent hard drive failure, since this has happened to a few people I am thinking it is related to Parallels. I was using beta4 at the time. Booting in single user mode revealed problems loading loginwindow (delting the plist didnt help). I would have spent more time analysing the problem but wanted to get something done so restoring from a backup was my first priority.

I am using Boot Camp as well, so am happy to accept this could have caused prolems. Instinct however tells me it was Parallels.

 

I have also experiences massive HD problems I believe are caused by Parallels somehow. My VM directory is now empty if I browse to it in parallels, but if I look in finder there are still files there. If I copy them to a new directory I can open them. All of my issues occored with Beta 4.