BSOD and Preprocessing failed after upgrade bootcamp XP to Vista

[Gregos]

Hi there,

I went through all the posts but did not find any answer to my particular issue.

I was running MAC OS X 10.4 on my MBP core duo 2 4GB RAM with a Windows XP pro SP2 (all updates installed) on boot camp. VMFusion was working smoothly until I've decided to upgrade XP to Vista Business. Since then I am not able to start Vista from VMFusion anymore....

Starting Vista on boot camp natively: no problemo !

Starting Vista from VMFusion leads to BSOD.... :'( (See attachments)

I've tried to rebuild the Boot Camp .vmware by deleting Boot Camp and Helper folders in ~/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/Virtual Machines and relaunch a preprocessing but all I can get is a preprocessing failed (drivers issues)

Does anyone have an idea of what I should do ?

(Please avoid something smart like "delete your Vista partition")

Thank you

Greg

[Gregos]

Come on ! I can't believe that nobody ran in this issue

[Mac_hatter]

I am still very green when it comes to this, but what about using your existing VM for Vista, and use that to create a new virtual machine? assuming you have the 20+GB of space needed (and given the need to have room to write a temp file or two in the process).

Maybe then once you have a new VM you can free up disk space?

[Gregos]

First thank you for your post !

I am using most of the time Vista natively on my boot camp partition. However, it happens, and it is currently the situatuion, that I have to work on my MACOSX partition.... and while I do that I would find very handy to use some of my softwares running on Vista...

To summarize the idea, I would like to use one of the VMFusion's features that are described on the box and I am pretty sure it is possible... :smileygrin:

cheers

Greg

[Andreas_Masur]

Did you try to delete the virtual (Boot Camp) folder and have Fusion recreate it? By default, it can be found at '~/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/Virtual Machines/Boot Camp'. Simply drag the folder to the trash can. Next time Fusion starts it should ask you whether you want to create a virtual machine off your Boot Camp partition.

Ciao, Andreas

[Gregos]

Thank you Andreas.

But as described in my original post, I've already tried that a couple of time without success.

Another idea ?

cheers

Greg

[Andreas_Masur]

Greg,

Sorry, I actually missed that in your original post. I have looked at your log file and I see three things:

-> It is complaining about a mismatched SCSI driver. It continues with the wrong one which may result in the guest system not to boot. Having said this, I have seen this before with Windows XP Boot Camp virtual machines (if I remember correctly) and although it is logged as a kind of failure it does not seem to have affected the actual virtual machine. May be it does with Vista.

-> "Unknown int 10h func 0x0000" - I don't know this message but it seems like an invalid jump address.

-> "Guest: 400 reconfig : FAILED: unable to copy target's software hive to tmp folder" - This seems to be the last thing happening before the virtual machine is shut down again. Again....have not seen this before.

Unfortunately, the above would require input from someone more experienced with the internals of these messages. Sorry about that.

Ciao, Andreas

[jim_gill]

I'm sorry you're having trouble. When setting up a Boot Camp partition to run in a virtual machine for the first time, Fusion allows up to 60 megabytes for a copies of the system and software hives of the registry.

The message "400 reconfig: unable to copy target's software hive to tmp folder" can occur if the registry is larger than we had expected.

Can you look into your c:\windows\system32\config folder and add up the size of the files SYSTEM and SOFTWARE? If this is close to 60MB, this is the problem. If so, and if you'd like, we can walk you through an alternative way of getting the virtual machine running.

[Gregos]

Hi Jim,

Thank you for your answer.

It seems that it may be, indeed, the problem.... SYSTEM file is about 20MB and SOFTWARE is 70 MB...

I made some tries on my side and I have been able to start my VM but it seems that it works with not all the settings checked...

First I've downloaded Parallels (sorry for that), went into some other problems with it but I have been able to start my boot camp Vista as a guest... Considering the fact that I was not able to start a VM with more than 1.3GB and that I am running a MBP Inter Core Duo 2 with 4GB, I decided to give another try with Fusion...

So what I did is before launching a new Boot Camp based VM I went trough the settings and disabled merely everything.... and "Voilà" the VM booted correctly... After that I 'have stopped it and modify the settings one by one until I met a failure...

So now the only configuration that is NOT working is when I connect automatically my USB devices at startup....

I am still interested by your "alternative way" as I don't really have the feeling that I am in stable situation... but it's just a feeling though....

Cheers

Greg

[Alyeska]

Hi Gregos,

I find myself with the exact same problem, and turning off the USB devices at start up solved it too (short term).

Have you found any better solutions??

Thanks in advance,

David