Warning: Don't install Parallels on Catalina if you don't wanna brick your machine!

[Super Spartan]

I got a brand new MacBook Pro 2019 with a clean install of Mac OS Catalina.

Installed all my apps which are a few anyway, configured everything to my liking, then I bought a license for Parallels 15 Home just in case I wanted to run Windows for testing things and tweaks that I normally do.

I installed it, all went fine, it asked me to give it a permission in the system preferences to allow access which I did. The app worked just fine. I went on about my day and was using the laptop with 0 issues.

Then for some reason I thought hey let me do a reboot after having installed so many apps. I rebooted, saw the progress bar moving then it stopped around 70%, then the screen went black and the fans started spinning. I let it sit there for a while but no luck so I force shut it down and booted up again, same thing. The machine was FUBAR.

I didn't have a clue what happened at this point. So after formatting and re-installing Catalina, before touching anything, I installed Parallels 15 again, the moment I rebooted the same issue happened so isolated the issue down to Parallels bricking the system for some weird reason even though on their site they claim that it IS compatible with Catalina!

I contacted their tech support and they tried convincing me to install it again and troubleshoot so they can pin point the issue but I said no thank you I am not planning on wasting yet another day reinstalling everything if it didn't work.


Long story short, don't try to install Parallels in the near future until they have sorted this issue.

 

[sliceoftoast]

I have Parallels 14 running fine - I upgraded from Mojave

 

[redpandadev]

I'd recommend going through some troubleshooting with them - my experience with their support has been excellent. Your experience is not a normal one - I have Parallels 15 running on Catalina with no issue, and work with at least a dozen other Macs that also have it working. There is something unique to your Mac that is causing this issue.

There is much troubleshooting that can be done, and your Mac is far from bricked. In fact, it's very likely you could recover from this issue without a reinstall if you were patient enough to troubleshoot.

Worst case: If this happens again, holding down shift at boot time will allow your computer to boot (it will load only minimal kernel extensions, but certainly enough to allow you to uninstall).

Start getting some information together. Boot in verbose mode (command+V at startup) - this will give you a scrolling text output of the boot process, which should indicate where it is getting stuck, and possibly a clue as to why it's getting stuck there.

There are a number of logs that Parallels produces that should also be useful. I don't know off the top of my head where these logs are kept. If you work with the Parallels team, there may also be additional logs (that wouldn't normally be generated) that they can collect.

 

[mmomega]

I have Parallels on 4 different machines on Catalina, including the same one you specify. Throughout the Developer Preview and now in to Cat 15.1b