Hi all,
For about half a yearI have been running a Windows 8 Pro guest in (pardon my french) Parallels Desktop 8. Before that I have been using Parallels Desktop win Windows 7 for a long time without any trouble, with Windows 8 I've had lots of problems. On three occasions after a reboot the VM would not boot, complaining about virual disk corruption. This could not be fixed, not even with the help of Parallels support so I was forced to revert to backups of the VM.
After the last time this happened I decided to give Fusion a try to see if that is more stable. I have been using it for two weeks now and so far am quite happy. One thing bothers me a lot however and that is that at seemingly random times (once every few days) Windows crashes with a blue screen stating "HAL_INITIALIZATION_FAILED". Fortunately restarting the VM works in these cases so nothing major is lost, but it is not the rock-solid performance I was hoping for.
One piece of information that might be relevant (but perhaps is a red herring) is that I am running the VM with the (unsupported setting "Hyper-V" as guest OS type. I need this because I want to use the VM for Windows Phone development which requires Hyper-V for the emulator. Could this be a reason for the crashes? If so, is it recommended that I switch the OS type to Hyper-V only when I am actually using the Windows Phone Emulator? Has anyone else experienced simmilar issues?
I would love to hear any comments and suggestions. My trial period is comming to an end and I only willing to spend the money buying Fusion if I can rely on it to be stable.
system information:
Macbook Pro, 15-inch, Early 2011
Fusion 5.03
OSX 10.8.4
Windows 8 Pro
Guest OS type: Hyper-V
Best regards,
Orderflow