Windows 2008 guest hangs while booting

[melevy]

I have a guest running Windows 2008 x64 that hangs whie booting. It was originally converted from a physical box months ago, and it's been rebooted a number of times since, but this morning we installed the latest MS updates. Now it gets the splash screen, and gets to a point where I can see that it's doing about 150K to the FC-connected SAN but just sits there.

Host system is an HP DL365 G5 with two quad-core AMD Opterons and 20GB of RAM. There are only four VMs at the moment - only three are active, and there is plenty of free RAM

What is going on and how can I get it to complete the boot?

[Joshua_Mally]

For 64bit Guest OS support you need to have Intel-VT or AMD-V enabled in the BIOS of the ESX server.

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks!!!

-Josh

Trying to learn

[melevy]

Josh, thank you for the reply, but as I mentioned, this guest has been running for at least 4 months now. It was shut down to install MS Windows updates, and finally finished booting after languishing for an hour. Even though it's back up & running, I still would like to know what was going on. An hour for a reboot is not acceptable.

[kastlr]

Hi,

so when you didn't change anything in your VMware configuration, the seen problem is caused by the applied hotfixes.

You should check the eventlog of the affected W2K8 host and it might be a good idea to enable the bootlog.

Hope this helps a bit.

Greetings from Germany. (CET)

[melevy]

The only change that I made was to remove a hard disk that had never been used.

[tdubb123]

are you on 3.5 U4?

[melevy]

I believe so, where can I look to confirm that?

[kastlr]

Hi,

when you remove a disk, this might cause the problem.

In W2K3 the boot process uses physical drive numbers, not quite sure if W2K8 still use the same mechanisum.

If the disk you removed wasn't the last disk seen by the host, the physical drive numbers were changed by the configuration change.

This could be the root cause for the seen behaivior.

Hope this helps a bit.

Greetings from Germany. (CET)

[melevy]

Hi, Ghost,

The OS is Windows 2008, and the disk that was removed was the last disk that was added.

-Mark