Poof is not MacPro, and repeatable

T

thorby

Member
I have posted several times about having a VM go poof i.e. drop back to "Stopped" state without warning, reason, or message. Most recently I posted Poof! the Movie to show it happening.

All this was on my MacPro, and presumptively an issue with the Xeon CPUs. But this morning I had a brainstorm: I connected the MacPro by a Firewire cable to a MacBook and booted the MacPro in Target mode, so its disks showed up on the laptop as mounted volumes.

Then I installed a Parallels Desktop trial on the laptop and used it to open the winxp.pvs VM off of the MacPro's disk. The exact, identical .pvs and .hdd files that you can see in "the movie" but executing in the MacBook Core Duo CPU. And... IT POOFED just like in the movie!!!

Conclusions: The "poof" failure is not related to Macpro hardware.

To review, this failure (which makes Parallels Desktop useless to me) affects good, working VMs which suddenly begin to "poof" and once they begin to do it, they keep doing it. It isn't the MacPro hardware as such. I earlier posted how I had compared the .pvs files of working and non-working VMs and they were the same. What does that leave?

Some particular VM use of the virtualized CPU or (my guess) the virtualized BIOS. What makes it repeatable? Probably, some content of the VM's memory that is stable from one boot to the next. The VM can go a long time (hours for me, apparently weeks for others) with no problem, but once it has the magic contents at the magic location, some otherwise-normal operation is interpreted by Parallels as shutting the VM down. Poof, back to "stopped" state.

Attention Parallels Support:

This failure is inherent in the .hdd file. I am burning the .pvs and .hdd to a DVD right now. If you have it you will be able to repeat the failure and debug it!. Just give me a name and a shipping address and it will be there tomorrow!
 
Second that

Just wanted to concur that I am seeing something similar on my MacBook Pro. I start the VM, log into XP. Then, POOF, back to the start state.
 
Update

:mad: I uninstalled Build 1922 and reinstalled Build 1848. I reinstalled the Parallels Tools and I am having the same issue. Not sure now if I should create a new VM with 1848 or just chuck the whole thing and go to Boot Camp.
 
thorby,

Could you try to create new VM (*.pvs) and attach your old *.hdd to it? My guess that your *.pvs file is broken - in this case it will help.
 
Andrew... Please see my note above. I completely uninstalled 1922 and reinstalled 1848 using the same .hdd file. The issue remains.
 
Could you try to create new VM (*.pvs) and attach your old *.hdd to it?
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I did try that a few days ago with an earlier failing case. I couldn't get the combination (new .pvs withold .hdd) to boot, I forget why. I could try again.
 
Could you try to create new VM (*.pvs) and attach your old *.hdd to it? My guess that your *.pvs file is broken - in this case it will help.
Click to expand...
Some time ago I wrote about comparing a broken .pvs to a new one and finding only one diff, which didn't make a difference when changed.

However, you inspire me to try again. I just copied the old .hdd to a different volume and built a new, custom VM specifying the copy of the .hdd. So there's a new .pvs attached to a copy of the old .hdd.

It poofs. Interestingly, not exactly like the old one: the old one goes instantly from the VM screen image to the Parallels window, while this one first goes back to a black screen image at the default size, and then goes to the Parallels screen. But it's basically the same.
 
thorby,

Please try latest 1940 build (available on forum). If still no luck - please contact me via PM - I will try to get your HDD + PVS to reproduce it in our labs.
 
Have you tried to copy the same files onto the MacBook and see if they work there?
Click to expand...
OK I am copying the two files from the DVD I burned -- which is all ready to ship to Renton just the very second I get a name to ship it to, hint hint onto the macbook's drive. Geez that takes a while... OK, I'm double-clicking the .pvs, it opens, I'm hitting the green triangle,

boot boot boot

poof!

Great! Thank you for making me do QA on my test case. It absolutely DOES fail when copied from the DVD to a macbook.

Parallels support, it's an iron-clad test case, where do I send it?
 
Andrew,

I did not delete the .pvs. I mistakenly assumed that uninstalling would take care of that. I have deleted the .pvs and and reinstalling 1922. I will post my results.

Thanks,

Greg
 
Andrew - it definitely fails with build 1940. I am on my way out the door to overnite the dvd. I will address it to "Attn: Andrew" -- if there's more than one Andrew, you might want to alert the mailroom... Thanks
 
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