I recently wrote Parallels technical support asking for help. My virtual machine was unable to get in touch with flash memory plugged into a USB port on my Mac. The tech advised me to download the latest Parallels upgrade, and gave me a list of steps to follow. I uninstalled Parallel tools, as advised, downloaded the new upgrade, as advised, and installed it as an upgrade, as advised. And rebooted my Mac OS, as advised. Then I clicked on my Parallels VM icon. Nothing happened. The icon developed a question mark. At the moment, my entire Virtual Machine is missing. No software. No files. I have no idea whether it will be recoverable or not. If anyone else is tempted to try the upgrade, or if you are a shopper asking yourself whether Parallels is a good idea - I would say wait. If Parallels can't implement an upgrade safely, it is a very dangerous piece of software. I have no idea whether this problem will be fixable.
Any Icons on your dock or desktop that was there prior to the upgrade will no longer work you will need to start Parallels from the Applications/Parallels/Parallels Desktop Icon. If you are still concerned as to the location of your VM it should be found in Macintosh HD/Users/[your user name]/Labrary/Parallels/[name of your virtual machine i.e. WinXP] You can restart your virtual machine from the .pvs file in this folder as well
please state from which version you started to upgrade and which final version you upgraded to. Also useful to state which two operating systrms you are talking about and the physical RAM and VM settings I had a similar problem about August last year with a beta test but the solution may not apply to you Hugh W