How do I access broken virtual FS?

[stretchman]

Hi all,

A Mac user friend of mine has screwed up their XP installation running under Parallels and needs to get important files from the virtual FS. One solution I've come accross is to reinstall XP in a fresh virtual partition and then mount the old one in order to access it. Boring...

There's no way this hasn't happened to hundreds of people before so my question is: isn't there some sort of util out there you can use to access files on a virtual partition and get what you need out before dumping it and saying good bye and good riddance to Windows once and for all???

[lurk]

When you say virtual partition are you running under Parallels or VMWare?

[stretchman]

Parallels!

[Giaguara]

That's where backup comes in play. No matter where yo run your system, which system and how, if there is data that matters, thats where you need to do backups.
Rsync, VCB, manual backup.. you choose.
Or you could use the boring workaround they suggested.

[stretchman]

Agreed! Backing up is one of those things we all know we should do but rarely get around to. For the record I do make regular backups but this particular user did not!

I've heard that this new time machine thing makes the whole backing up process very painless indeed although I don't know if it would help with files stored under Windows..

Since posting this morning I'm wondering if such a util exists. I'm thinking it might be more complicated than just reading files within what is effectively one big file, (the virtual partition). I'd expect there must be some encryption etc.. Otherwise what's to stop people just running a live disk with the necessary utils and accessing your private data..

Anyway, my original problem description was, in hindsight, a bit vague so I'll offer up some more details...

- it's a macbook (one of those little white ones)
- running OSX 10.4 to the best of my knowledge
- XP running via Parallels will not start
- files stored in the XP virtual partition need to be recovered

Also, a mac guy I know thinks that the problem is/was caused by a bad block on the physical disk and this bad block happens to be where something critical to a sucessful XP start up is located. Any suggestions or ideas?

Excuse my ignorance, I chose the third way... ;-)

[lurk]

Parallels comes with a program called Parallels Explorer that might be able to help you. It depends on the format of the virtual disk, why don't you fire it up and give it a try.