Fusion 5.03 with Windows 8 guest random crashes "HAL_INITIALIZATION_FAILED"

[orderflow]

Hi all,

For about half a yearI have been running a Windows 8 Pro guest in (pardon my french) Parallels Desktop 8. Before that I have been using Parallels Desktop win Windows 7 for a long time without any trouble, with Windows 8 I've had lots of problems. On three occasions after a reboot the VM would not boot, complaining about virual disk corruption. This could not be fixed, not even with the help of Parallels support so I was forced to revert to backups of the VM.

After the last time this happened I decided to give Fusion a try to see if that is more stable. I have been using it for two weeks now and so far am quite happy. One thing bothers me a lot however and that is that at seemingly random times (once every few days) Windows crashes with a blue screen stating "HAL_INITIALIZATION_FAILED". Fortunately restarting the VM works in these cases so nothing major is lost, but it is not the rock-solid performance I was hoping for.

One piece of information that might be relevant (but perhaps is a red herring) is that I am running the VM with the (unsupported setting "Hyper-V" as guest OS type. I need this because I want to use the VM for Windows Phone development which requires Hyper-V for the emulator. Could this be a reason for the crashes? If so, is it recommended that I switch the OS type to Hyper-V only when I am actually using the Windows Phone Emulator? Has anyone else experienced simmilar issues?

I would love to hear any comments and suggestions. My trial period is comming to an end and I only willing to spend the money buying Fusion if I can rely on it to be stable.

system information:

Macbook Pro, 15-inch, Early 2011

Fusion 5.03

OSX 10.8.4

Windows 8 Pro

Guest OS type: Hyper-V

Best regards,

Orderflow

[admin]

Hyper-V will not run in a VM that has the Windows enlightenments currently necessary for Windows 8 stability.  If you want stability, disable the Hyper-V role and switch the guest OS type to Windows 8.

[orderflow]

thanks for your response, I am not sure what the "Windows enlightenments" are. Is that a layer provided by fusion to the vm? Do you know if hyper-v will be supported in the future?

Is it safe to keep switching between the options"Windows 8" and "hyper-v" and rebooting as needed? Or does that increase the chances for vm corruption?

[admin · Accepted solution]

Windows enlightenments are modifications to the Windows operating system when it is aware that it is running in a virtual machine.  They are provided by Microsoft and may or may not be supported by the host hypervisor.  An example for Windows 8 would be the relaxation of the watchdog timer used to detect when a CPU has locked up.  If Windows knows it's running in a VM, it doesn't expect a response as quickly as it does in the physical world.

Unfortunately, if we try to use any enlightenments, Hyper-V will recognize that it is running in a virtual machine and will refuse to start.  As long as Microsoft takes this stance, do not expect Hyper-V to be supported as a guest OS.

It is not really "safe" to use the Hyper-V guest OS type.  I would suggest using a throw-away VM for your Windows Phone development and storing all of your important data off of the VM.

[orderflow]

Thanks a lot for your very clear response. Indeed I have seen an error message involving a watchdog violation prior to at least one of the HAL_INITIALIZATION_FAILED messages. I now understand this is a problem with microsoft policy instead of a bug in vmware.

I'll look into the throw-away vm option, but one problem might be that I need an extra license for windows 8. Also it gets a bit crowded on my macbook's drives.

Do you know where I can find more information about exactly what happens when different guest OS type selections are made? Maybe I can then make an informed decission about the risk I am taking by choosing Hyper-V. I am probably willing to suffer a BSOD and a reboot once every week, but I don't want to be loosing whole VM's like what happened with Parallels.

I am also still wondering wether Windows will be bothered by me switching guest OS type settings every now and then. Could it lead to windows requiring re-activation for example?

Too bad Microsoft makes this difficult

[admin]

The effects of various guest OS type selections are not well documented.  The fundamental difference between Hyper-V and Windows 8 is that we do not provide the Hyper-V guest type with a list of the enlightenments we support.  I do not believe that this will lead to reactivation requirements if you switch between the two.