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nickh0559
Contributor
Contributor

VMWare 14 causing Blue Screen Of Death on Win 7 guest. Win7 Guest was working on VMWare 12

Hi All;

I am at present regretting my decision to upgrade to VMware 14. I have many guest OSs running under VMware but it is my primary (I use it most) Win 7 guest that has trouble.  Ever since the upgrade I get random BSODs from the Win 7 guest (Was nicely stable under VMware 12).  BSODS can happen when I am working in the guest or when I am not even present. No identified triggers at this time.

To test out that I did not somehow sneak in a bad driver or other evil little thing right at the transition I did pull out an old archive of the Win 7 guest.  It also fails in the exact same random manner.

We have a clear case of working fine in VMware 12 and flakey in VMware 14 with a Win 7 guest.  Clues?

Host Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, gobs of resources available to both the host and VM  (128GB Host, 16GB Guest,  I-7  6 core processor, lots of free disk.).

Any pointer would be useful.

Thanks

Nick

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yanw
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Would you please try to upgrade your Win 7 guest's hardware version to latest? Also update the vmware-tools to latest.

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nickh0559
Contributor
Contributor

A while ago I figured out the cause though not the cure.  I thought it would be good to at least post the cause here so that the next searcher has that. 

It was USB flash drives mounted in the guest OS.  I would only get the crashes when I had a flash drive mounted in the guest Win 7.  It took a while figure out because it was fairly spotty as to when the crash would happen.  But now I am a couple weeks with no crashes once I stopped mounting flash dives.

Not sure of how to fix it so I can use flash drives.  But at least the system is stable.

Thanks

Nick

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yanw
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Hi, Nick:

Thanks for your reporting the issue. If you can stable reproduce the issue, would you please upload the dump files of windows 7? The files should locate the C:\Windows\Minidump folder. Minidump files are useful to us because they contain basic information like the error message associated with a blue-screen of death.

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xxhallxx
Contributor
Contributor

I have recently been having the same issues, but I don't think mine correlates to any drivers. This is BSODing my host and guest now. I have a windows 10 host and a Windows 7 x64 guest. I had a clone from 2-28-18, so when I started having the issue--I wiped the first and loaded that one. It happens to any new clone I put in there, so I know its not that guest vm itself...

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