I’ve been trying to get a specific hardware device to work on my Parallels installation—it’s a film and slide digital converter. It works fine on my XP machine at school, but I couldn’t get it to work in Parallels. It does rely on DirectX 9 which the Parallels 4.0 update was advertised as having adding improved support for. So I updated thinking that maybe the problem was that Parallels wasn’t supporting DirectX 9 well enough to run the program.
I once again tried using the converter in Parallels with no success. I looked a little further into the requirements and it says that it required XP-SP2 or Vista. Our school computers are still on SP2, but I had updated my Macs virtual machine to SP3 after installing XP onto my computer. I just assumed that it was a good choice.
I came to the conclusion that the “minor” difference may explain why I could get it to work on my school computer, but not on my Mac in Parallels.
So, last night I decided to uninstall the SP3 from my Windows virtual machine. It appeared to work fine, although it took quite a long time.
However, when it finished and I initiated the required restart, the problems began. It began a vicious repeating cycle of errors screens. The next two screenshots are as close as I could get to capturing the dialogue. The image disappeared from the screen so quickly, that I can’t guarantee that I captured at the exact moment in order to catch all of the text. The two screens kept reappearing as it automatically continued trying to successfully reboot. My only way out was to quit out of Parallels.
I was able to restore based on an older snapshot that I had. However, I’d still like to try uninstalling SP3 so that I can try my hardware once again.
I was hoping that some of you have worked on Windows machines (and in Parallels) enough to know from the error dialogue what might have caused this issue. I don’t want to have the entire problem recreated when I try the uninstall again.
Any ideas or advice?
Has anyone ever uninstalled the SP3 update?
I’m assuming that if I run into issues again, the Parallels “Snapshot” feature reinstalls/reverts XP back to the exact state it was in prior to the failed attempt.