Common sense is not so common.

My personal mac’s HD was dying so I had used Apple’s Migration Assistant to move my stuff to a work mac-hine. This work machine was already equipped with it’s own Parallels, and used to have windows via Parallels vm on it.  First I thought, “…wow, this is great! I can use three machines on one work machine! They will surely promote me to QA now!”. Then the horror struck.

I reboot the work mac and there is another user on the login screen with my name. I eventually figured out that Migration Assistant made an entirely NEW USER ACCOUNT with my prefs, my libs, my folders and all the apps that the work mac had (these were all choices when using  Migration Assistant  or “mi.ass.” as I like to call it). Cool, I log in all my prefs are there and my bacon is on the wallpaper as it should be, and my adium accounts are just where I left them on my mac.

So back to work right? NOPE. I looked in the Apps folder and there lie TWO parallels folders, one with the name “Parallels” and the other with “Parallels (old mac)”. Ok, granted my mac is only 6 months old with a dying HD it’s not “old”. Anyfoo I began to open the parallels app from the “old mac” or my mac or the thing I’ve been using for work all this time because I want to get back to work.

First thing I notice is the change in Network Adapter. It no longer is using the Host-Only network choice but the Bridged network. In fact, when I looked to see if I could change it back to my WORKING parameters, the options where greyed out!  I looked at Apple -> Sharing-> Internet and there was only Built-In Ethernet and Built-In Firewire under the Airport Option! My old mac had at least one more option called (en2), which conveniently was what I used to make the mac host see the vm guest!!! I tried all combinations of Apple’s Internet Sharing, Parallels Network Adapters and rebooting until work mac SIGHED during bootup. I run to the parallels forum and look for an answer – not helpful. I scour the web for hints and noone has ever used these two apps mi.ass. and parallels together. Wrote to support@parallels and was beginning to cry because I am the “.. only webdev that doesn’t know how to work my local environment.”

Then my number was called. My savior, the ops person came over after lunch, looked scratched his head and we talked. I said that, “Parallels is not working at all now and gave me this error msg:

“Error occurred while trying to interact with Parallels driver!
Parallels Desktop is either not installed or/and configured or has
integrity problems, which prevent it from operating properly. Please
reinstall the Parallels Desktop.”

See why he was scratching his head? So I threw my hands up and said, “I don’t think you can solve my Parallels problem, but maybe you can tell me why I don’ t have (en2) on my Apple -> Sharing-> Internet menu.” He looked, scratched his head wonders why the options weren’t there. Made some magic  under the Admin account (looked at the Network option under sysprefs) and got the en’s back on my account. We couldn’t DO anything with it since opening up Parallels now meant seeing an error msg instead of linux boot messages, but we verified that the options were now there on the parallels menu and I selected the setting of Host Only, as working before on my mac.

After that I mentioned that I saw two Parallels folders in Apps and he easily came to the conclusion that there is something conflicting with my old mac parallels and the work macs. There was light at the end of the tunnel! Here is how it worked:

1.  drag one paralles folder out of Apps
2. start up parallels from the copy in the apps folder
3. does it give you an error msg? if  no, then you can toss the one not in the Apps folder to the garbage since  the files that have the vm OS and files are read in /Users/yourname/Library/Parallels. if YES go to #4
4. If the parallels gives you the same error msg then guess that the parallels that is outside of Apps is the one TRUE copy for the work mac
5. fire up the parallels from the folder that is not in app and your vm. and this should be the end of your headache! everything RUNS!
6. Cleanup: shutdown your vm. drag the my mac/old mac/broken Parallels into the trash and drag the working parallels into your Apps folder – where it rightfully belongs.

Last but not least, while mi.ass.ing if there is ever a prompt for you to replace or copy, MAKE SURE NEVER TO REPLACE. Obviously the way I listed wouldn’t have been possible if I ONLY had the WRONG CHOICE of Parallels.

I really hope this helps someone out there in vm-mac-land.

P.S. If you’re using a linux vm and you constantly log into your vm using the Terminal App, don’t forget to add your vm address to the /etc/hosts file (just cd /etc/hosts). You won’t be able to ssh into your vm without it.

P.S.S. Sorry to anyone I was grumpy to while trying this out.