Mar 13, '07 07:30:01AM • Contributed by: kirkmc
Nothing on the Parallels web site provided any solution, nor did a post to the forum. But today, a colleague told me that he had a similar problem installing Vista in Parallels on a Mac that only had 512 MB of RAM. Both the iMac and my Mac Pro have 2 GB RAM, so that didn't seem to be the problem.
So, I saw that there was an update to Parallels today. I downloaded it and tried again, but to no avail. Then I wondered if the RAM could be preventing the installation. After the installer rebooted, I shut down the virtual machine, then set its RAM to 1024 MB (by default, when running an "express" installation, Parallels allocates only 512 MB to the VM).
I then tried installing XP Home. At first, the installation went further than my previous tries, but then it stalled again. I ended up relaunching the VM and restarting the installation about ten times -- using the custom install method -- and finally got it to work, but in the process saw all kinds of errors: some related to memory (read or write errors), others saying certain drivers couldn't be found or installed, and one showing a blue screen with a lot of text, talking about a specific error which I just managed to get a screen shot of before Parallels switched back to the VM configuration screen. So, allocating more memory did work, but did not seem to resolve the problem entirely. Perhaps there's a sweet spot for memory that I didn't find?
Curiously, when I installed a first VM on my Mac Pro last year - with the previous release build of Parallels - I had no problem. I assume that something in this build is managing RAM differently. If you have this problem, try increasing the RAM during the installation; you can always lower it, if necessary, once the VM is set up. You may or may not have similar installation problems as I did--in fact, if others have had this problem, do mention it in the comments.
