How to terminate a frozen virtual machine

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Symptoms

It is impossible to stop/restart a virtual machine from the Parallels Desktop User Interface because all the buttons are grayed out.

Resolution

Note: if you run a virtual machine on a Mac with macOS 13, please check the list of known issues first.

 If your virtual machine is stuck with a black screen, try performing the steps from KB 123094 first.

For other situations it's required to force quit the virtual machine process using Activity Monitor application:

  1. On your Mac, open the Activity Monitor application from Finder -> Applications -> Utilities and find the following process:

    In Parallels Desktop the process name is the virtual machine's name:

  2. Highlight this process, click X at the top left corner and choose the Force Quit option.

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  3. Restart the virtual machine.

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