It's been a bad couple days with my Mac, and the end is not yet in sight. The lesson learned, I think, is to also have a backup copy of my BootCamp partition.
Thursday, when my wife was quitting Windows in Parallels (which uses my BootCamp partition), Windows crashed. She had to force quit Parallels. That night, I found that Parallels no longer would run. A few hours later, I found that BootCamp would no longer boot -- the HAL.dll was missing/corrupt. I've seen this before, but I couldn't fix it this time.
I spent a few more hours running through standard MS-recommended XP fixes with the Recovery console. No success.
Last night, I used BootCamp to reinstall / repair Windows XP. This reinstalls XP on top of the existing install, not affecting personal data. It worked, but I had no internet access from BootCamp, BootCamp drivers wouldn't reinstall, and Parallels was still dead.
So I decided to blow the whole partition and start from scratch. And while I'm at it, increase my partition size as I was too skimpy originally. Aha, but BootCamp can't create the new partition: "some files cannot be moved". The solution is to backup the Mac, do a complete reinstall, and try again.
So now SuperDuper! is doing a backup of my entire Mac to an external hard drive. Tonight, I hold my breath, cross my fingers, knock on wood, sacrifice a virgin to the volcano gods, and wipe my MBP's hard drive and reinstall from the SuperDuper backup (my heart nearly stops, writing that).
Then reinstall BootCamp and Parallels, hope that the gods of Redmond don't give me activation woes, pray my finance program and VPN clients reinstall without trouble, and hopefully have it all working so I can work from home this weekend to meet a ludicrous work schedule.
I think if I had a master clone of my BootCamp partition, this would have been fixed many hours earlier. After I'm fully operational, I'll be looking for a BootCamp backup option. Suggestions?
Thursday, when my wife was quitting Windows in Parallels (which uses my BootCamp partition), Windows crashed. She had to force quit Parallels. That night, I found that Parallels no longer would run. A few hours later, I found that BootCamp would no longer boot -- the HAL.dll was missing/corrupt. I've seen this before, but I couldn't fix it this time.
I spent a few more hours running through standard MS-recommended XP fixes with the Recovery console. No success.
Last night, I used BootCamp to reinstall / repair Windows XP. This reinstalls XP on top of the existing install, not affecting personal data. It worked, but I had no internet access from BootCamp, BootCamp drivers wouldn't reinstall, and Parallels was still dead.
So I decided to blow the whole partition and start from scratch. And while I'm at it, increase my partition size as I was too skimpy originally. Aha, but BootCamp can't create the new partition: "some files cannot be moved". The solution is to backup the Mac, do a complete reinstall, and try again.
So now SuperDuper! is doing a backup of my entire Mac to an external hard drive. Tonight, I hold my breath, cross my fingers, knock on wood, sacrifice a virgin to the volcano gods, and wipe my MBP's hard drive and reinstall from the SuperDuper backup (my heart nearly stops, writing that).
Then reinstall BootCamp and Parallels, hope that the gods of Redmond don't give me activation woes, pray my finance program and VPN clients reinstall without trouble, and hopefully have it all working so I can work from home this weekend to meet a ludicrous work schedule.
I think if I had a master clone of my BootCamp partition, this would have been fixed many hours earlier. After I'm fully operational, I'll be looking for a BootCamp backup option. Suggestions?
