For the last four years have been running Pan 6 via parallels on an older mac. Have had great success at it until last night.
I learned that Parallels works as a “virtual” drive, and that drive seems to have gotten corrupted. That machine, which I put Parallels on 4 years ago, had little issues like it would go to sleep, and if I didn’t wake it up within a few hours of using the machine, it would require a passport to restart the computer. It would do a half-ass restart in which it would restart the computer in about 20 to 30 seconds, and everything was good.
So, it was a regular routine that I just lived with. Usually, if I were finished for the day/night, I would turn off Parallels and just let it do its thing. Last night, I did my usual Sunday night update. I started the routine while the Vikings/Lions football game, and then I got interested in the game and went to watch it. At halftime, a little over an hour later, went back to finish up things and the computer wasn’t completely shut down, so I putt in my passcode, it started up loading the files that was open when I left to watch the football game.
One of the last things it did was open up Parallels, which I noticed was struggling to boot up. After about two minutes of trying to open it, I got the kiss-of-death message that the machine couldn’t be opened and needed to be reloaded.
It didn’t seem to be able to find the drive or whatever Parallels needed to start.
After an hour of trying to get it to load, I started looking around and found that with my Parallels rental, I get full technical support, which is something we don’t see with software anymore.
I spent about four hours with the tech guy who took control of my computer and tried several things that didn’t work, concluding that the virtual disc was corrupted.
The bad news is that I have been lazy about backing up things, on Christmas morning I backed up the week to week files, but stupidly I did not back up the main file that puts the weekly tournaments in one place. I didn’t back up those files because I was making changes to the Panorama files, which I finished yesterday afternoon. I was going to back those files up later this week, unfortunately I didn’t get around to it and now I have to figure out how to update that file from some incomplete backups. To answer a question, yes, I didn’t use Time Machine or Carbon Copy Cloner because I didn’t know it would record the virtual stuff of Parallels.
So it’s an ugly scenario, one we hear about every day. We all feel sorry for the poor bastard and tell ourselves it could never happen to us, but it just happened to me.
When I put Parallels on the drive, the Parallels tech guy had some questions that I couldn’t answer, like why I was using Mojave for the OS file. He also said that the Parallels system, which was 17, was ancient. He was trying to upgrade to Parallel 20, which didn’t work. He also found out that Parallels 20 and Mojave don’t work together.
So, I need to talk to someone and devise a plan of attack, first trying to retrieve the files (which I feel may be impossible) or two putting Parallels back on, which may be hard to do now. One piece of good news is that I have the old computer I used to use and will be firing it up for the first time in a year to see if I can update some of these files in Pan 6 and try to run the business as best I can.
My question is, does anyone have any experience with what happened to me and can help guide me through restoring my files and redoing Parallels? I fear that I need to find Parallels 17 and then Mojave.
It’s a real mess.
Thanks for any assistance.