I've researched what Parallels Tools do in a Fusion VM: the answer seems to be "not much."

The service portion of Parallels Tools runs as a process called "toolsrv." For my migrated Windows XP VM at least, taskmgr shows it taking 0% of CPU time and about 2 MB of memory (most of which is presumably paged out). There's also a service called "cohrence" that apparently only starts if it finds itself in a Parallels VM. Anyway, you can disable both these services using Administrative Tools -> Services with no ill effect.

Parallels Tools's other main payload is device drivers. Device Manager suggests to me that none of those drivers is actually mapped to any hardware in a VMware VM.

User billearl is correct to point out that, if you want to remove Parallels Tools using Parallels's uninstaller, you must do so before running VMware Converter. I just find it bothersome to use any application (Converter or any other) in a Parallels VM without Tools, just as it's bothersome to do work in a VMware VM without Tools. My aims in the migration instructions were simplicity and ease of use, so in this case I sacrificed some tidiness in favor of those ends.

In case anybody's wondering: removing Parallels Tools from a VM before migrating it to Fusion makes it neither easier nor harder to bring that VM back to Parallels. Parallels Transporter always reinstalls Parallels Tools as its last step in migrating a VM to Parallels. (Of course we hope our customers will not feel the need to do that.)

User reeven wrote:





Before I get into the details of your question, I wonder whether you followed the beta4 conversion instructions (where you originally posted) or these. Just to be on the safe side, I suggest discarding your previous conversion attempt and starting fresh with these instructions in this thread if so.

Although there's nothing I can think of in the beta4 instructions that would cause your problem, you'll be happier with the VM that results from the RC1 instructions.

OK, now to your question. This may seem silly, but I have to ask: did you click with the mouse inside the VM window? When you have a VMware VM without VMware Tools, that's what you have to do to give it input focus. Then, to get focus out of the VM and back to the host, you press cmd-ctrl. (The same deal applies to Parallels VMs without Parallels Tools, except for the fact that they use ctrl-option instead.)

You should see the message at the very bottom of the VM window change. When your VM does not have input focus, a message will say "To direct input to this virtual machine, click inside the window." When your VM does have focus, that message will read "To return to your computer, press ctrl-cmd."

Converter, assuming you downloaded it within the last few months, will be version 3.0.1, which injects a temporary mouse driver into VMs it makes. (To check the version, you can fire back up your Parallels VM temporarily, launch Converter, and choose Help -> About.) At least one person on this forum somehow accidentally got 3.0.0, which did not inject the temporary mouse driver, so he had no mouse until he got VMware Tools installed. It is possible to install Tools using the keyboard only, but it's a pain.

When the VM boots for the first time, be sure to let it sit there and discover devices until it announces "Okay! Time to reboot!" And only try to install VMware Tools after the reboot. (Why? The installation of VMware Tools employs a virtual CD-ROM. But before that reboot, Windows may not think it has a CD-ROM drive.)

If the problem persists, be sure to post (on this thread!) what happens when you try to click to give mouse focus to a VM. Also, tell us what version of Mac OS you're running (I'm not aware of any problems in this regard with Leopard, but support for it is experimental presently).

There aren't many options, and no good options. VMware Converter does not yet support converting Vista, and I cannot announce when that'll happen. I was about to suggest using one of Converter's competing products, like Leostream P>V Direct, but that one, at least, does not seem to support Vista conversions yet either.

It's possible to do a conversion operation by hand, but unless you're a fairly advanced Windows system administrator, this will take more time than just building a new VM.

If your migration fails at 2% with this rather generic message:

[code]ERROR: Failed to take snapshot of a source volume.
Possible causes include not having any NTFS volumes on Windows XP or Windows 2003 source systems, and not having enough free space.[/code]

there's one other possible explanation that is not mentioned in that message. Right-click on My Computer, choose Manage, and drill into Services. In the resulting list of services, "MS Software Shadow Copy Provider" and "Volume Shadow Copy" must both not be disabled.

If either is disabled, right-click, choose Properties, and set its startup mode to Manual (instead of Disabled).

Thanks to user ToddWeber for this reminder!

It sounds as if you have the same problem with VMs converted from Parallels and VMs built natively under Fusion. Is that right? If so, the problem is likely to be unrelated to the conversion process.

I wonder whether you have USB Overdrive installed in Mac OS. That has proven problematic for folks in betas of Fusion.

Anyway, I myself have successfully installed VMware Tools without using the mouse before, although it's a little irritating. It helps to know that you can always click ctrl-cmd to get input focus (keyboard and mouse) out of the VM, and clicking with the mouse inside the VM window puts keyboard and mouse focus back to the VM.

I assume you're building a Windows VM, so it also helps to know that you can use alt-tab to move among windows, and alt+F4 to kill a window that's in the way. Most buttons have an underlined first letter, so you can choose the button just by hitting the letter. Using these keyboard tricks, I have successfully gotten VMware Tools to install, at which point the mouse starts working and life is good.