Parallels and Ubuntu 10.10 boot issue

Ubuntu’s graphical environment stopped working under Parallels after an upgrade. Turns out the Parallels Tools was incompatible with the newer release. Here’s how I fixed it.

I recently ran into a problem upgrading to Ubuntu 10.10 in Parallels. The graphical interface (runlevel 5) wasn’t coming up after the reboot, instead I was getting the command line version (runlevel 3).

When I booted Ubuntu, I got a message stating that /media/psf could not be mounted.

Here’s how I solved it.
This tip gave me insight that the problem was an old Parallels Tool that was incompatible with the newer Ubuntu.

Ubuntu gave a preference for skipping the mount (S) or booting manually (M) to fix it. I booted manually, went to the /etc/init.d directory, and moved the prltoolsd to another directory to get it out of the way, and then rebooted.

# mv /etc/init.d/prltoolsd ~myaccount
# reboot

Parallels then let me boot in safe graphical mode. On the desktop was a virtual Parallels Tools volume, already mounted.

I opened up the terminal to a bash prompt, changed to the directory with the Parallels install script, and ran it with the remove option, then rebooted again:

$ cd ‘/media/Parallels Tools’
$ sudo ./install -r
$ sudo reboot

GNU Grub came up and I booted back to the generic kernel. Things were back to normal.

WIth the latest version of Parallels installed, and the old Parallels Tools uninstalled, I was able to open a Terminal, sudo to root, and install the new version of Parallel’s tool. Apparently the incompatibility has been resolved.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.