Parallels 4.0 is DANGEROUS

[Stinky The Clown]

I 'upgraded' from 3 to 4.

It failed to work properly

It hosed my boot camp partition and all my Windows apps.

On the install it blows away all of the leftovers from 3.0, so there is no going back.

Recovery involved uninstalling 4 and reinstalling 3. But first I had to recover my Boot Camp install and that involved re-re-re-re-re-activating Windows and a few hours on the phone (literally) with some guys in Bangalore who wanted to know why I exceeded the allowable number of installs for my 5 (6? 7?) year old copies of XP, Outlook, and Visio Professional. I had to endure the SAME third degree for each product with a new BangaloreGuy.

Long story short ..... this episode cost me two and a half days' worth of time and untold agony.

This experience made the WORST Windows nightmare I ever personally experienced pale by comparison.

[Ezlivin]

1. I wonder if it had something to do with the Boot Camp install

I've been using Parallels since it was beta and recently upgraded from 3.0 to 4.0. But I wasn't running Boot Camp (on a Mac Pro).

After I upgraded I even installed FreeBSD, Apache 2.0, PHP 5.2, MySQL 5 and a bunch of other software and created a web development server. I had already installed XP and it upgraded just fine.

I'm sorry to hear of your problems. For me Parallels 4.0 has been a very good upgrade.

[Stinky The Clown]

2. It might be the Boot Camp ..... no one really knows and Parallels is keeping their mouths shut

I was at the Mac Store and they sell it, but no one was commenting. The Mac guy at the Best Buy Mac booth is the only one who spoke to me about it. He says 4.0 is very buggy and suggests only using Fusion.

The intertubes are sure full of posts from very angry Parallels 4 upgraders, all of who seem eventually to do what i did .... go back to 3.0.

I'm at a crossroads. My wife wants it on her iMac and we have a new arrival - a MacBook - onto which I need to put some Windows stuff.

I think I'm going to try Fusion.

[Ezlivin]

3. You should try Fusion

I've heard that VMWare's Fusion is a good alternative.

It's frustrating when you have problems with an application and someone says "It works fine for me."

Well, it works fine for me. :)

Good luck with Fusion; I hope it works well for you.

[av8rdave]

4. I talked to a friend at work that uses Fusion and he's happy with it

I'm just sticking with boot camp. I don't do enough in Windows that requires switching on the fly.

[Deja Q]

11. I purchased Fusion and love it...

I don't use it much (Office 2007, Bryce, UltraFractal) but I loathe dual booting. I just want to use one OS and emulate the rest. Fusion takes a performance hit, but it's not big enough for me to really care about. If it was, I'd have gotten a Mac Pro with 8 cores (16 thanks to hyperthreading) and even then I know it still wouldn't run natively...

If it wasn't for classroom work requiring Office, I would have gone for Crossover Mac exclusively. (the Linux version does run UltraFractal). I'm trying to support Mac apps more than fiddling with emulation these days... and having been an avid user of Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, SuSE), OS X is far more refined, solid, nimble, and actually supports ALL my hardware. Even my Perfection 4180 flatbed scanner (Linux STILL doesn't support that and likely never will.)

[Spritz57]

5. I both called Apple and spoke with the techs at the genius bar yesterday

Both recommended using Boot Camp rather than Fusion and Parallels (at the cost of a sale I might add). They suggested Boot Camp is the only one that keeps virtually everything completely separate on the hard drive. They contend the convenience of switching on the fly has its downside. Both told me they get many service calls for repair with the two most aforementioned popular programs--very few with Boot Camp. I realize, I'm only as good as my information but they convinced me to stay with Boot Camp for now.

[moggie]

6. What kind of repair?

I'm surprised by that. Apple presumably won't help you if your Windows gets hosed, so are they suggesting that Fusion or Parallels cause problems for Leopard? That's certainly never been my experience with Fusion, though I use it mainly with Linux guests rather than Windows, and with virtual disks rather than a Boot Camp partition.

One great feature of Fusion (and Parallels, though I haven't used recent versions of Parallels) is snapshots. I used this just a couple of days ago, for example. I was about to evaluate a package which I knew was going to install files all over the place, and this piece of software doesn't use package management, so manually restoring the guest OS to pristine state after I'd finished would have been tiresome. So I just took a snapshot before I started. When I'd finished evaluating the software in question, I just rolled back to that snapshot, and bingo, the whole OS was back as it had been. You can even have automated, timed snapshots: a little like using Time Machine, but for your virtual machine. So, if something screws up Windows, just roll back to the last good snapshot, which takes seconds, and you're back in business.

[Spritz57]

7. Well both were apparently careful saying they get service calls (as I typed)

but in light of your surprise response, perhaps they don't provide the service. Though I would not be surprised that charging a fee would make anything possible. I didn't understand them to say with any clarity that these programs definitely caused problems only that it is their observation based upon numerous service calls by consumers many have had problems. As I wrote earlier, they both talked me out of a purchase so I gave their opinions some weight though I'm admittedly a neophyte here on this topic.

Out of curiosity wouldn't time machine accomplish the same function as snapshots? How is it Snapshot different than Time Machine?

[moggie]

8. Time Machine isn't really useful with Fusion

(I can't speak of Parallels, not having recent experience with it).

When Fusion creates a "virtual disk" for a guest OS, it's either (from Mac OS's point of view) a single large file, or optionally the space is split into separate files each of which can grow to 2 GB as you fill up the virtual disk. Let's say you have the latter, and a tiny change happens in the guest OS (one line being added to a log file, perhaps, or even just the "last accessed" timestamp of a file changing). Time Machine will see this as a change to the entire 2 GB virtual disk subfile this part of the guest's filesystem falls in, so it'll back up that entire 2 GB. And such changes are going on in the guest OS all the time it's running, so if you let Time Machine do its stuff, your backup disk quickly fills up. To add insult to injury, those backups aren't much use to you. Suppose you accidentally delete a file in the guest OS, and want it back. Which 2 GB chunk(s) of your virtual disk do you need to restore? You don't know, so you'd end up restoring the entire virtual disk (losing any other changes you'd made in the meantime). And if the guest OS was writing to the filesystem while Time Machine was backing up, it would be unsafe to restore from those files anyway, because then the guest's filesystem could end up in an inconsistent state.

So, you'd normally exclude Fusion's virtual disks from Time Machine backups, and make alternate backup arrangements. I have a nightly job which clones my internal disks (everything, including Fusion's stuff) to an external 1 TB disk. This means I could lose up to a day's work in the VMs, but at least I know I'll be able to restore safely.

Boot Camp partitions aren't of interest to Time Machine, of course.

With snapshots, each snapshot is a picture of your entire guest OS at that instant in time. So they're still not useful for those "I need to get back that one file without losing any other changes" moments, but great for "I'm about to make huge changes, and want to be able to undo them all if they screw things up". You can also use Autoprotect, which automatically takes snapshots at regular intervals, deleting the oldest ones. By default, this takes hourly snapshots, and keeps the last 4 hourlies, 3 dailes, and 3 weeklies.

[Spritz57]

9. Thanks for the information!

I was somewhat disappointed with Time Machine for it does not allow one to override a simple mistake without a complete overwrite as you stated. I initially thought one could access the external drive and simply import a file or small cluster of files.

I can see the application of Snapshots could be a terrific tool. As I read your comments, Snapshots is only available for the guest OS not the primary OS, is this correct?

What do you think about Apple's contention that Boot Camp is the safest choice. Both people I spoke with favored Fusion over Parallels if pressed to make a choice between the two btw.

Out of curiosity, if I may ask, how do you clone your internal drive to an external drive? I'm no stranger to computer hardware nor PC's but I'm still learning Mac's (that is, the higher functions of OSX). I feel fairly competent with OS's through XP, I'm learning Vista (as, dare I say, that window slowly closes with 7 looming) so is there a function within Leopard which allows one to completely and safely archive one's internal drive? I might prefer this option over Time Machine or if possible use both. It would be terrific if one could have a pseudo fully accessible risc drive set up.

[moggie]

10. Snapshots etc

As I read your comments, Snapshots is only available for the guest OS not the primary OS, is this correct?

The snapshot functionality I'm talking about here is provided by Fusion (and I believe Parallels provides something very similar) for snapshotting the guest OS's virtual disk(s), and won't provide similar functionality for Mac OS volumes. It's possible that snapshots will appear in Mac OS at some point: I believe Apple have advertised full ZFS support for at least the server version of Snow Leopard, and ZFS (a pretty innovative filesystem) supports snapshots. Whether this will be usable for the desktop version of Snow Leopard, I don't know. And whether I'd trust all my files to Apple's ZFS is another matter... I think I'd prefer to let other people find the bugs first.

What do you think about Apple's contention that Boot Camp is the safest choice.

I've used various Linux guest installs under various versions of Fusion since its initial public beta, with no problems. Although I have a couple of XP virtual machines (one on my Pro and one on my Macbook), I hardly ever use them, so I can't really comment on Windows-specific problems. In theory, a bug in Fusion could thoroughly hose my VMs, but what's more likely is that such a bug would just hurt the current VM filesystem, requiring a rollback to the latest good snapshot. Your OS running via Boot Camp could crash and burn too, for the usual blue-screen reasons, and there you don't have the luxury of snapshots. And as I've pointed out before in this forum, Windows running via Boot Camp has complete low-level access to the machine, including your Mac OS partition, so in principle a problem in Windows (faulty driver, malware etc) could trash all your Mac OS files. Unlikely, but possible. But a virtual machine environment like Fusion is a sandbox: the guest OS could trash its own virtual disk, and any Mac OS areas you've explicitly shared to it, but it can't "reach out" and stomp on the rest of your system. So I'd say a VM is safer.

how do you clone your internal drive to an external drive?

Third-party software. I use SuperDuper, but there's also Carbon Copy Cloner, which many people like. If you can afford the extra drive, it's best to think of something like this as a complement to Time Machine, rather than an alternative. TM is the solution to when you accidentally trash that important document and want to retrieve a copy from an hour ago, whereas SD or CCC are for when your internal disk suddenly dies and you want to be able to immediately boot from last night's copy and carry on working.