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:
1. Parallels Image Tool - Included with Parallels. Launch it from Applications/Parallels. Let's you merge images/snapshots, alter your virtual drive image etc. My experience: Didn't do a thing for me, nor did it report errors. Always said it merged all snapshots (within like a second).
2. Parallels Mounter - If you right click on an .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. This may work for you if for example you can't boot your VM. You still might be able to get at the files within it. Worked a little bit for me, but overall left me unsatisfied. It failed to open any snapshot image and I knew with certainty that they weren't all corrupt.
3. PhotoRec - Orginally a tool for recovering photos from corrupted drives, PhotoRec at http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec was my magic bullet. 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. 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.
4. R-Studio - http://www.r-studio.com/ - Using R-Studio in demo mode, I was able to open up my Parallels snapshot images and have it scan to find many files. 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. 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. I give them credit for having a solution that was at least able to read the image though. 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.
This blog is a work in progress and I'm going to be filling it in with more detail as time allows.
In the mean time if you have any questions, ask and I'll dig up information which might be able to help you.
-John
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment