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jmotylinski
Contributor
Contributor

VM Crashing on Start

Hi -

I have a Windows 2003 Server VM which crashes on starting of the VM. Last night I shutdown the VM and this morning it won't start. Attempting to start the VM will crash Fusion completely. VMDKMounter won't mount the VM disk either.

I have other VMs that run fine. I upgraded to Fusion 2.0.1 last week and haven't had a problem with it. I'm running on a Macbook Pro, 2.4 ghz, 4gigs of RAM. The VM is set to use 2 CPUs and 2gigs of RAM. I attached my vmware-fusion.log, if it will help.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in adavance,

Jason

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eknauft
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Thanks for uploading the logs. They are very informative.

Unfortunately, this vmdk's metadata is very corrupted. Normally the SparseChecker will try to patch up common metadata errors, such as the kind that happen when you pull the plug on your computer or crash Fusion, but these are not those kind of errors. It looks like someone was scribbling randomly over your metadata -- possibly there were two VMs that managed to get ahold of the same disk? There should be locking to prevent this, so it would be a bug. Can you describe what happened to the VM before it became unbootable?

It is very unlikely that you can recover this VM to a bootable state. Even if you can patch up the metadata, it is likely that the data on disk will be incosistent. Do you have important data you need to retrieve from this VM? It is possible to manually patch up the disk so you can attach it to another VM and run a data recovery program on it, though it will take some effort.

If you have snapshots of the VM, reverting to an older version is likely to work.

Let me know if there is anything I can help with.

-Eric

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