Parallels Desktop for Mac build 3036 Beta is available for download.

You might have to do this in the disk management tool under control panel / administrator tools. I don't think the drive label carries over when you open the explorer and just rename it, but I could be wrong.

 

I had the exact same situation and renaming the drive worked just fine.

 

Makes me wonder if it's possible to somehow grant permission to mount/unmount that partition to my non-admin user. I'd be perfectly happy to do it myself, I'll see if I can figure that out.

 

mlandel: i believe that the first NIC is eth0, and the second is eth1, and so forth. But if you want to be SURE, just do an "ifconfig" within the Unix guest and match the MAC addresses.

 

awesome! i was able to rename the drive to "bootcamp"...boy, do i have a lot to learn about windows.

don

 

Build 3036

I love the the new features
However I have had problems with blue screens and 8 bit colour probs (lack of video memory for 1920x1200 here maybe?)...
Also, I have felt that working from my bootcamp partition isn't as fast as I used to be able to get from my previous XP installation onto a HD image.. using the boot camp partitiion with 3036 I "feel" like I am in an emulator and I haven't felt that before.

However, it's still beta and it looks to me that Parallels are going in the right direction for my needs. Keep it up!

 

But I'm not running Windows - I'm running Linux on that machine and running other linux distros under VMWare.

 

I'm trying hard to forget it.

 

Just to be clear...

Thanks for all the good info in this thread...

I've read through the posts and still have these 2 questions:

1. I have an XP Pro install on Parallels and of course I'd like to avoid installing XP all over again in Boot Camp (which I have never used).

2. I'd also like to avoid reinstalling all of the XP applications.

Are these 2 things possible?

Thanks!

Rich

 

Can't use Boot Camp partition

I have the same problem. MacBook Pro 17'', Windows partition made by the Boot Camp assistant, in ntfs now. I installed the tools in Boot Camp, then created a VM with it and ran it. It worked, though not as fast as I expected. Nevertheless, I have never been allowed to use the Boot Camp option as a drive in other VMs.
Moreover, I used this VM once, then I used boot camp without Parallels for some days. Now that I try to use it again, it tells me "Boot Camp is not installed on this computer" ! I removed the tools from Boot Camp and reinstalled them, with no success.

Any solution guys ?

 

Hi,

althrough Parallels is incredible, I have to admit that the Keyboard and Mouse problem is a pain in the arse.

I set up all correctly, including drivers on my Core2Duo MB, but all I get is an XP Bootmanager that I can just enter via external USB Keyboard, and - what is even more important - no Mouse and keyboard in Parallels. (Parallels Tools installed of course, I did the RTFM )

After prolly 30 VM reboots and connecting all kind of HID devices to my USB ports - there still is no dice. Even more worse is that I have to completely reboot my OSX if I connect my internal keyboard/touchpad to the VMachine, because it will just refuse to respond after that completely.

It is XP SP2 Prof., NTFS and not activated atm. Works like a charm in native mode, and even boots fine in Parallels, but it is a bad feeling to see the OS and you can't touch it.

The coherency mode does not work here, too. It is OSX 10.4.8.

I don't think that there is anything to fix about it. Just wanted to let you know.

 

3036 VERY beta but showing a bright future !!!

I stopped using 3036 after 10 minutes, it seems to by VERY beta !
i couldn't stand to have the same problems we had until build 1970 again.

i think it is a strange aproach to release a lot unstable, not working betas
causing huge forum discussions with crash logs, etc ...
but anyway, 3036 is showing the future and it is a bright future !!!

i just dont want to share all those bug experiences and stay put with 1970
for now. but i'm looking forward for a non-beta (& working ;-) release

to be a bit constructive, too :
form Z 5.5 (a lot of palette windows) plus coherence made all windows
disapear, blank screen... (caused me to stop using 3036)

 

Ah yes. The obvious approach. Don't know what I was thinking, but Thanks!

Indeed: Interface 1 is eth0, Interface 2 is eth1, Interface 3 is eth2, etc.

 

Processing Allocation with multiple VMs running

Folks,

I've got a Mac Pro with 4 processors. If I run multiple virtual machines, will their processing load be pread over all four processors? Will each VM go to a different processor? How is the load shared?

Has this changed at all in release 3036 or otherwise since back in the beginning? I recalled looking at this early on (when I had but a Mac Book Pro) and it appeared that any number of VM's were spread over both processors. Now if I'm running multiple VM's (Three in my case) it looks like one processor is being heavily loaded. Is there any way to associate threads/process loading with a particular processor?

Thanks,

Matt

 

Boot Camp activation is an issue

I too had issues with the re-activation using Boot Camp (and for the record, I know it's displayed as an issue right on the first post of this thread). It's a very, very cool idea, but it seems pointless right now, so much that I don't believe it should have been included in the release.

If you have a Boot Camp partition, then it stands to reason that you need to occasionally boot to it directly. If you didn't need to do that, then you would just use the virtual machine all the time. This release doesn't change that at all: you're still limited to Boot Camp OR Parallels Desktop, because you have to re-activate every time you switch, which Microsoft simply will not allow. The end effect is no different than what we had previously.

I'm curious as to how on earth they'll manage to get around this. To XP, every time you switch between the virtual machine and your actual machine, you really *are* changing the hardware (at least as perceived by XP) significantly. It's analogous to literally taking the hard drive out of one PC and dropping it in another. I'm a software developer myself, but know very little about how virtual machines are utilized, but why can't hardware be emulated in a "pass through" mode, i.e. your video card is recognized as the same card in your virtual machine, as are the rest of the computer's components?

 

Of course I meant cores instead of processors. When 8-core machines are available next year, It'd be great if this means that I can run more VM's efficiently!

Matt

 

Switching between Coherence & Full Screen needs work

1. Things are fine when I switch from Full Scrn (FS) to Coherence, but then if I minimize a window, the FS part of what I minimized is on the Mac desktop. The Mac screen should be clear. I hope this makes sense.

2. Likewise, when I switch back from Coherence to FS all the windows revert to small windows which I then have to resize. They should retain their FS size.

I hope this helps.

 

I've been using the new beta for a few days, now. By and large I'm happy with it. A couple of thoughts, however:

Resuming suspended VMs has been agonizingly slow several times, now. Usually it's quite zippy (esp. with the released version), but I actually had to force-quit one because it was killing my machine and taking for-freaking-ever.

I noticed that cmd-xvc are passed through as their Windows equivalents. Could you also suppress cmd-h and cmd-tab, so that the stupid start menu doesn't show up when I come back to the VM? I cmd-tab a *lot* and that start menu is a pain in the butt. It'd be nice to have these configurable, too.

I'd like to be able to turn off the resizable VM windows; when XP restores, I end up with some weird sizes, and it's actually told me it was running in some kind of reduced-capacity display with the weird size when booting. Maybe an option to turn it off, and perhaps another option to limit the resizing to certain resolutions? And if you could make it in blue that'd be great. Thanks

I'd like to be able to turn off the status bar at the bottom. That used to go away when you collapsed the toolbar. This takes up more screen real estate, and either shrinks the VM's resolution vertically when it hits the dock, or causes my Linux VM to scroll.

Great work, folks!

 

Windows 2000 won't run with 3036

I had a similar experience with Win 2000. It would get to the Windows login prompt, I'd enter the password, the desktop background appeared, then it went into the "report this error" (which I did) loop. I was initially able to get it far enough to install the new Parallel tools, but now it won't run past the login prompt. It runs fine with Win XP and with SUSE SLES9, however.

Thanks to sdidier, I tried raising memory allocation from 468 to 768 and now Win 2000 runs fine, though I'm not too fond of the large memory increase.

 

Not that I can speak for Parallels, but just to try and clarify something...

I am sure that Parallels knows that having to reactivate Windows each time you switch back and forth between running Windows in the VM and Boot Camp is not acceptable. That is why their approach to it involves creating the separate hardware profiles you see at the Windows boot screen.

Those profiles were originally designed mostly for laptop users who had docking stations. One profile would be for the laptop when on the go, and the second profile would be for when you plug into a docking station with extra ports, extra hard drives, connected printers, etc. Windows would be intelligent enough to use the extra profile without complaining about activation or reconfiguring your hardware every time you docked/undocked your laptop.

For whatever reason, Parallels' current implementation of the second profile (the one for their VM, since the original profile was for Boot Camp directly) is clearly broken for some users. It may not have come up during their testing, but now that it's "out in the wild" it's an issue that many are seeing.

My point is this...I have no doubt that Parallels did NOT intentionally release 3036 (even as a beta) knowing that the switch between Boot Camp and VM was going to REQUIRE a reactivation every single time. That would be ridiculous. I am sure this issue came as a surprise to them, and I'm sure they agree with everyone that it's a serious bug that needs to be resolved. So let's just give them a chance to figure out the cause, and it will be fixed.

Like everyone else here, I would be happier if we got more detailed reports from Parallels. Something along the lines of:

"Thanks for all of your reports on build 3036. We have duplicated and identified the cause of the following 6 major issues: <insert issues here>. Our team is working on these issues, and further info will be released as soon as possible. For now, we no longer need additional reports pointing out these specific issues, but please bring other issues to our attention."

Something like that might prevent 25 new topics about the same exact problem being repeated over and over again. But we keep asking Parallels to be more responsive and vocal on these forums, and while some (Andrew in particular) do their best to communicate, it seems the company as a whole is more focused on silently fixing issues than spending too much time talking about them here. So since actions speak louder than words, I will stop grumbling about the lack of "talk" here, and be confident that Parallels is working hard on the next build.

-- Ensoniq