Starting, Stopping and Resetting a Virtual Machine

Starting a Virtual Machine

To start a virtual machine, do one of the following:

• Right-click the virtual machine in the Parallels Virtual Machines dialog and choose the Start option. For detailed information on this dialog, see Parallels Virtual Machines Dialog.
• Click the virtual machine in the Parallels Virtual Machines dialog and click the Start button in the Parallels Desktop toolbar.
• Click the virtual machine in the Parallels Virtual Machines dialog and choose Start from the Virtual Machine menu.

After starting the virtual machine, it will boot into the guest operating system installed in this virtual machine. If no guest operating system is installed in the virtual machine, you will see the following message: "No boot device is available...".

Note: You can start virtual machines only if your copy of Parallels Desktop is activated. See the Activating Parallels Desktop section for details.

Stopping a Virtual Machine

To turn off the virtual machine, use the standard shutdown procedure of the guest operating system installed in it or click the Shut Down button in the Parallels Desktop toolbar. If the guest operating system cannot be shut down for some reason or other, you can forcibly stop the virtual machine by doing one of the following:

• clicking the Stop button in the Parallels Desktop toolbar or
• choosing Stop from the Virtual Machine menu.

Warning: If you forcibly stop the virtual machine, you may lose all unsaved data.

Resetting a Virtual Machine

If some program error has caused your virtual machine to hang, you may wish to reset the virtual machine.

To reset the virtual machine, do one of the following:

• Choose Reset from the Virtual Machine menu.
• Click the Reset button in the Parallels Desktop toolbar. If this button is absent from the toolbar, refer to the Customizing Toolbar subsection.
• Press Ctrl+Alt+Del while the keyboard input is captured inside a virtual machine window.

Warning: If you reset the virtual machine, you may lose all unsaved data.

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