I'm travelling in South East Asia, using my Mac Mini with BT Keyboard and iPad as a VNC display... much cheaper than worrying about a $2500 laptop. However, short power cuts of 1-10 minutes are very common, maybe once a week on average. After the most recent power outage, I brought back up the Host (Mac OS Lion) and ran verify disk, with no errors. My Mountain Lion Guest OS also booted back to where it had been previously. My Lion Guest refuses to open it's virtual disk - especially annoying since it is the home for some licensed software locked to work only on one machine, so I have quite a song and dance to remotely deactivate the license, and have a new license token created to relicense it on a newly created Guest VM in addition to several hours of downloading Lion, Xcode, etc etc. I read many many threads with various solutions to this problem going back to PD5 and earlier, none of which worked. Luckily I didn't lose anything irreplaceable, only several wasted hours that I can't bill for while I rebuilt my work environment from the ground up. But, for future reference, is there a reliable way to recover a virtual harddisk locked up in this way? There is no lock file in the "harddrive.hdd" bundle when I step inside using 'show package contents'. The permissions of all the files in there allow the user running Parallels Desktop (that's me) full read and write access to everything. If I try to mount the harddrive.hdd from a different VM, I get the same 'Unable to connect to Harddisk' error sheet. From the Snapshot Manager, with the "password required to enter snapshot manager" option ticked, the password entry sheet slides down, but refuses to take input. I managed to turn the password required option off, but snapshot manager will not let me revert to either of the earlier snapshots (I've forgotten the exact error, and now I can't reconnect the disk to the VM, so I can't go back and check). I then removed the virtual drive using the Guest Configuration dialogues, but now I get the same 'Unable to connect Harddisk' error sheet whenever I try to re-add it to the virtual hardware list. If I try to mount the virtual drive to my Host OS using Parallels Mounter, it tells me that the harddisk requires a password. That's correct, and I know the password, but I'm not given the opportunity to enter it before Parallels Mounter errors out. At this point, it looks as though Parallels hosed the virtual disk files during the power outage (isn't it using HFS+ journaling to ensure atomic writes to prevent unrecoverable errors?!?), but I'd very much like to be shown how to recover the contents of the virtual drive.
