Virtual drive unusable after spontaneous reboot

I installed XP and a bunch of apps in Parallel's Beta 5 and have been using it for a few days with no problem. However, just an hour ago it caused a spontaneous reboot and after getting back into OS X and starting Parallel's I just get a message saying "A disk read error occurred Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart".

Is it common for the virtual drive to become corrupt after a crash? It is quite frustrating as I had spent some time installing Office, VS2005 and a bunch of other apps so I'm not keen on starting with a fresh install. Is there a way I can recover from this error?

 

Thanks for reporting - we will investigate this.

 

I had the same problem under Beta 3 or Beta 4. I lost a lot of data that hadn't hit my backup yet, because I'd been forced to save a bunch of mail out to PSTs. You guys should put together a recovery tool so I can try to look through the virtual disk and recover that stuff ;-)

 

My crash and subsequent unrecoverable hard-disk failure occured with an expanding virtual drive. When I reinstalled I've used a "plain" virtual drive in the hope that it is more robust.

 

This used to happen with fair frequency with VPC, and I got used to making backup copies of my VPC drives so I could recover when they became corrupt. My recommendation is to keep a backup copy of your drive.

 

This used to happen with fair frequency with VPC, and I got used to making backup copies of my VPC drives so I could recover when they became corrupt. My recommendation is to keep a backup copy of your drive and update it any time you install new SW.

 

I hope you get an answer, I just had this happen also. I was just closing an app in a Windows XP VM. All of a sudden the screen went black and my whole MacBook Pro rebooted. I was stunned. After the reboot, I ran permissions thinking that maybe something was wrong. Tried restarting Parallels, but I keep getting the disk read error followed by a request for Ctrl+Alt+Del. I send the Ctrl+Alt+Del, but the same error comes up again and again. I have lost hours and hours of unrecoverable work from this weekend and I am going to cry soon.

 

Forgot to mention that I am using Build 3188, not a beta.

 

I have the same problem and I realized the cause of this is that I chose the virtual drive to be set up on a partition which I formatted in the FAT32 file system instead of the MAC OS X system. I thought it was the right thing to do and it turned out to be wrong.

After retrying a few times of setting up the virtual drive on the partition with the FAT32 file system with the drive corrupting for no reason, I reformatted the partition to native Mac OS X file system and set up the virtual drive on it again, the drive has not corrupted for even once since.

This requirement is actually briefly mentioned in the user guide of Parallel Desktop, but I personally missed out on it.

Sorry for the run-on sentences, but anyhow, hope this helps.

Miss Joey