Running PFE under Parallels - Questions and Problems

[Anette von der Handt]

Hi,

I am sure I am not the only one who is running PFE via Parallels on my Mac. My old computer clearly did not have the computing power to make it an enjoyable experience (and I did the offline processing through Teamviewer access on a PC) but with a new computer I will give it a try again.

However, let me start with a problem that I think is related to my Parallels set-up.

I just installed PFE and upon start-up it asks me to create all the User Data folders. Usually, the program just creates them automatically (based on whatever I specified in probewin.ini) but I get now an error message instead (see below). Manually creating the folders does not have an effect. Accordingly, I cannot get PFE to start at this point.

I assume it has something to do with folder paths or writing rights under Parallels. Anyone else ever had that problem?

Thanks!
Anette

[Karsten Goemann]

Hi Anette,

I've been using PFE under Parallels (now version 9) with Windows 7-64 on my MacBook Air for a few years now and haven't had that problem. It does sound like a permission issue. Not sure what to suggest. Does the Windows account you are using have administrator rights? Have you tried running PFE as administrator, or creating the user directories somewhere else, e.g. in the My Documents folder of your Windows account which should always be accessible? How about User Account Control settings, virus scanner....?

Cheers,
Karsten

[Anette von der Handt]

Hi Karsten,

some excellent pointers. I made sure that I gave the program all the administrative rights and have an exception in the firewall. I will play with the My Documents folder option a bit.

It is good to know that it is not always a problem though. I am also discussing it in the Parallels forum. When I get it to work I will report back in case someone else runs into it.

Thanks!
Anette

[Anette von der Handt]

Ok, I finally fixed it and of course it was something fairly trivial. Maybe this helps others as well as it seems to regularly occur under Parallels 10 while I never had any problem installing Probe Software off-line under Parallels 9 (and Windows 7 in my case).

Obviously, all user account permissions should be set to "administrator". The culprit in my case was that the "Probe Software" folder was automatically set to read-only. Changing it to read&write permission proved to be difficult as Windows would not apply the changes.

A solution to this is to change the folder attributes manually by going to the Command window (type in cmd in the run window) and then type

attrib -r +s C:\Probe Software

(or whatever your folder path is).

Then the program loads just fine.

[Anette von der Handt]

Ok,

just an update on my last post because the problem is not entirely resolved (that would have been too easy). Nevertheless, after further investigations the problem falls squarely on the shoulders of Windows.

Apparently, Windows occasionally goes haywire and insists on setting folder attributes under C:/ to "read-only". You can remove this attribute for a short moment but in my case it gets re-set quickly, so I cannot run Monte Carlo or Fanal calculations at the moment (because it cannot write-out).

I saw this behavior occur with a couple of new Windows installations (Mac Users getting Windows for PFE for the first time) but apparently it can also show up after Windows updates (check the internet, many people with this problem).

At this point, I will go the brute force way and do a complete re-installation on my system (because I have only one Windows partition to begin with) and hope for the best. May you all be spared from this problem.

[Karsten Goemann]

Hi Anette, if you have enough disk space you could create an additional virtual machine with a separate Windows installation to see if it helps? Or move the old one to an external disk. This way you could still go back if it doesn't help.
I've been lucky - I haven't seen this problem with my installation.