I’ve been using Parallels Desktop for Mac for quite some time now; pretty much since when it was available to purchase. I’ve always loved it’s speed, compatibility, and it’s always been fairly easy to use. When the most recent set of betas came out with support to use a Boot Camp partition as a virtual hard drive, I was excited. No longer would I have to have two separate installations of XP on my Mac. Unfortunately, I could never get it to work, receiving an annoying error each time. I haven’t had time to trace down the problem until today, but I think I’ve solved it, at least for my situation.

I think the error stems from the fact that I’m using a Windows XP Professional Corporate Edition SP2 (say that 3 times fast!). The error I received was this:

Parallels Desktop cannot find necessary drivers to configure your Boot Camp partition. Please refer to Help> Parallels Desktop Help> Using Boot Camp Windows XP Installation for troubleshooting.

In all previous betas, the documentation had no mention of how to fix this, and nor was the Parallels forum any help. In the most recent beta, there’s a mention of how to fix this:

1 Boot into Windows XP via Boot Camp
2 Insert Microsoft Windows XP installation disc which was used for this Windows XP
installation.
3 Locate the folder i368 on the disc and open it. Copy the following files: driver.cab
and any of spN.cab files (sp1.cab or sp2.cab, etc depending on service package
installed) to the folder: C:\WIndows\Driver Cache\i386.

Unfortunately, my XP disc didn’t have sp1.cab or sp2.cab on it. Copying just driver.cab from the disc made no difference in regards to the error. I managed to find another copy of XP (I think it was Pro, but not Corporate), and found that it has the necessary sp2.cab file. Once I put that file in the C:\Windows\Driver Cache\i386 folder, Parallels played nice with Boot Camp.