I know after my previous post some people were concerned that upgrading to Parallels 9 might be ill-advised, so I am posting this update in part to alleviate such concerns.
Over the past 2-3 days I have moved over 1TB of data from the volume where I was storing my virtual machines and templates, placing it instead on temporary, alternate storage.
Having removed any and all possible permissions cruft (no ACL’s) and taken all the safety’s off (777) for the vm’s folder and all content, there was simply no earthly reason for any issue with permissions in that folder that I could see.
Yet when I was moving the data attempts to delete certain files in that folder were resulting in OS X errors (unexpected error code -50), which increased my confidence that the underlying issue was a problem with the file system on that volume, rather than any bug in Parallels itself, despite the Disk Utility’s assurances that there were no problems.
I then reformatted the volume before replacing that 1TB of data.
When it came to the VM’s, I first replaced only one of the smaller ones and ran it through a series of start / shutdown / start / suspend / resume / stop / start / etc cycles.
Touch-wood, this appears to have resolved the permissions problem that was preventing Parallels from starting or resuming virtual machines on that volume. Yay! 🙂
Lessons From History
I have had similar problems with that volume in the past, but at that time I was still storing my VM’s on the system HDD and the symptoms in that case were slightly different. It was also a different physical volume at that point – a 1TB Western Digital drive, rather than the 2TB disk that now occupies that slot in the enclosure (an early model, USB only, 4TB max. SohoTank ST-2), setup as JBOD rather than mirrored volumes.
On that occasion I experienced problems when trying to empty the trash if it contained files on that volume, and Adobe Lightroom reported errors when trying to put files on that volume into the trash.
Disk Utility Verify and Repair did indicate issues with the file system on that occasion, though it wasn’t able to repair all of them, and a reformat was the eventual solution on that occasion also.
I am left wondering if there is perhaps some creeping issue with the enclosure itself since (touch-wood) I have not suffered any similar problems with other HDDs – not even the 2nd disk in that same enclosure – and yet 2 different physical disks in the same slot in that enclosure have now been subjected to very similar issues, albeit only twice in 2 years with trouble-free operation for 2 years before that.
If nothing else, the USB 2.0 interface on it is crippling when having to move – en masse – the quantities of data around that the disks within it now accommodate. Time perhaps to consider upgrading to a FireWire or Thunderbolt enclosure.
But whatever I decide and whenever I get around to it, in the meantime I think people can rest assured that Parallels 9 itself was not the problem.
And I can get back to mobile development with Oxygene.
Coming Attractions
Coming up next: Implementing and Debugging an AppWidget with Oxygene.