Guest hangs in BIOS: "Booting from hard drive..."

A user recently force quit Parallels, and is now the virtual machine will not start.

It indicates it is "Suspended", although this can be changed to "Stopped" by editing the configuration of the virtual machine.

However, starting the virtual machine yields a freeze/hang on the BIOS screen with the message "Booting from hard disk..." and the cursor appears several characters further to the right.

I have tried to open the hdd file in Parallels Explorer. It indicates the virtual machine is suspended and I choose to open in "open to view" mode. The contained filesystem appears, labelled "Volume (1) NTFS", but trying to open it does not work and Parallels Explorer reports it is "unable to open the filesystem" and it "is not supported or contains errors" and instructs me to start the virtual machine and check the disk for errors. However, because the VM hangs in the BIOS, I can't do that.

Also, I have one snapshot. I ran the Snapshot Manager to try and remove it, hoping Parallels might rewrite the disk file and "fix" it. But the SM reports an error opening the file and it can't remove the snapshot.

All of this was occurring with Parallels 3.0 v.5564 (was that the last version?). I just updated to v.5600, hoping it might be able to handle the error and fix it, but it can't.

This doesn't seem like a guest filesystem error (although perhaps WindowsXP does need a chkdsk run); it seems like an error with the Parallels metadata in the HDD package/file.

There is no corruption in the DiskDescriptor.xml file, nor in the .PVS file.

Any advice?

I'm trying to fix this over the weekend.

Thanks very much!

 

Try this article.
http://kb.parallels.com/en/5223
You can also perform permissions repair, from Disk Utility