I love it except I had one major thing go wrong that I learned the hard way 'how' to avoid (if at all possible) in the future. Well I was running Parallels and I inserted a USB dongle to view some pictures on a SD card. I ended up removing the dongle and suspending the virtual machine. Later when I went to resume the virtual machine I was presented with the following message:
"Virtual machine cannot be started because of the following problem:
Parallels Desktop is unable to access the virtual hard disk image file /Users/../Documents/Parallels/../*.hdd. The file is used by other application."
I tried so many things to get my virtual machine up and running again so I wouldn't lose my data...but alas...hope was gone! I went through all the knowledge base articles and Googled as many articles I could in hope of finding a solution but sadly - nothing.
I actually was determined to find a solution to this so I walked my Mac Laptop to the Parallels office in Renton, Washington. I know this was not normal protocol but asked to speak to someone. I worked with a lady named Tracy who was very helpful - though there is no known solution to date. But interesting - I did find some very interesting information about some best practices:
1) Try not to use snapshots (this is more of a VMWare feature that Parallels does include)
2) Backup the *.hdd file to an external hard drive if possible. If something goes kwirky - you got your backup via copy n' paste.
3) When closing down the virtual machine - Shut Off Windows within the virtual machine "first"
Look for more tech tidbits to come...
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