Unattended.fdd - emulated store for unattended installs from what I've read, I honestly didn't care as I don't think it had anything to do with repairing a broken VM. (One of the most unreliable parts of Parallels in my opinion) Snapshots.xml - Ties together the order of the snapshots and is used in conjunction with the Parallels snapshot manager. sav files (contains state of open apps, etc at snapshot time, though I don't know all of the details exactly.)įor each snapshot, there will be four files, each named with the GUID (globally unique ID) of the snapshot. Snapshots folder - Contains memory images (.mem files), Screen shot at the time of capture (.png files), Configuration file (.pvc files, which you can view with TextEdit) and. If you're experiencing errors, you might find a clue in here as to what's going wrong. Parallels.log - log file for viewing what's going on in Parallels. If you're curious, go ahead and open it to see what's in there.įloppy.fdd - emulated store for floppy drives XML format that you can view in a text editor, most of the things you change through the VM settings are stored in this file.
Let's say you have a Windows 7 VM and it's located in your Documents/Parallels/Windows 7.pvm folder.Ĭonfig.pvs - contains the settings for your virtual machine. This is all based on Parallels 5 and I believe it's all quite similar for Version 4 Remember, this is coming not from an engineer at Parallels, just a techie that spent way too much time trying to understand all of this. In the mean time if you have any questions, ask and I'll dig up information which might be able to help you. This blog is a work in progress and I'm going to be filling it in with more detail as time allows. Parallels support, when I was on the phone with them, after asking many times, said there is no way to read the data other than the basic utilities you're provided with in the installation of Parallels. I give them credit for having a solution that was at least able to read the image though. Many text files had no meaningful content, some images I found were OK, it was hit and miss, and for $80, I wasn't entirely confident in it's ability to be able to restore many of the files I was looking for.
Though the trial mode was limited to extracting 64K sized files, many of the files that I was able to extract just to see if it was working were all jumbled. R-Studio - - Using R-Studio in demo mode, I was able to open up my Parallels snapshot images and have it scan to find many files. And it's FREE! One caveat, not all of the names of the files that it recovered were recognizable, but it found everything that I was looking for and put my mind at ease.Ĥ. It takes a little bit of work to use but it was the only tool I found that opened up one of my most valuable Parallels snapshot (.hds files) and pulled out all of the files from it and conveniently put them into another folder on my Mac. PhotoRec - Orginally a tool for recovering photos from corrupted drives, PhotoRec at was my magic bullet. It failed to open any snapshot image and I knew with certainty that they weren't all corrupt.ģ. Worked a little bit for me, but overall left me unsatisfied. You still might be able to get at the files within it.
This may work for you if for example you can't boot your VM. hdd file in your Parallels VM folder, you can mount one of your drive images and browse it within Finder just like any other drive/folder. Parallels Mounter - If you right click on an. Always said it merged all snapshots (within like a second).Ģ. My experience: Didn't do a thing for me, nor did it report errors.
Let's you merge images/snapshots, alter your virtual drive image etc. Parallels Image Tool - Included with Parallels. I'm listing the tools I've tried, some which didn't work for me, but depending on the exact problem you're experiencing, let's hope one of them is the magic bullet for you:ġ.