Win 7 VM moved from 2012 1st gen (early 2012) 15" Retina MacBook Pro crashes on Windows boot in brand new Retina MacBook Pro

[MacNephDoc]

I've been running a Win 7 Ultimate VM on a 2012 MacBook Pro (8 GB RAM, 256 GB flash "drive" for a few generations of the Mac OS. The VM is encrypted by Credant (a requirement of my Electronic Health Records vendor), but that's not caused any troubles with Mac OS updates (Mountain Lion to Mavericks). I'm still at Fusion 5.0.3, simply because it continued to work normally even with the update to Mavericks.

HOWEVER, my VM had grown gradually to use more than half the disk space on the Mac's internal flash memory boot volume, and when current gen MacBook Pros began appearing on Apple's refurb online store, I jumped for a 2.3 GHz Haswell Core i7, 16 GB RAM, 512 GB Flash memory boot "disk", TB2.

I just finished transferring everything from the old Mac to the new one (18 short minutes using Migration Assistant via a Thunderbolt cable!). Everything works fine except my Win 7 VM. The first time I launched Fusion 5.0.3 on the new machine and tried to boot the VM (yes, I had shut it down appropriately on the old machine before transferring it), Fusion asked for my Mac admin user password, then asked me if I'd moved or copied the VM. I answered "moved".

The "Starting Windows" animation of colored dots into the pulsating Windows logo proceeded normally, but hung there and then crashed to a blue alert screen after two minutes, reporting "BAD_SYSTEM_CONFIG_INFO", did a "crash dump", then presented me with a 2-choice window suggesting I try booting into Windows Error Recovery (doesn't work; repaints exactly the same screen instantly) or "Start Windows Normally" (repeats the aborted boot process).

I didn't think the VM should be affected by anything that I've changed, unless it can recognize the different processor and graphics coprocessor.

Any suggestions? Does anyone think a (belated) upgrade to Fusion 6 might help? I can't just reinstall my VM on my laptop when bound to Active Directory on my LAN at work because our EHR server will recognize that it's not encrypted and refuse to allow it on the VPN tunnel to the server. My IT support person is 50 miles away. I would guess he could support me remotely but I doubt he could recreate my VM's "whole disk encryption" remotely.

Thanks so much,

Jim Robertson

[WoodyZ]

1.  Have you tried booting to Safe Mode?

2.  What was the exact BSOD Error... STOP 0x... what?

BTW Yes the Virtual Machine will see the Host's CPU as different/new hardware.  While I'm not familiar with Credant's WDE I'll just throw this out there in case it has some relevance...  Is some aspect of the Credant's WDE tied to system hardware information like the CPU's serial number?

[MacNephDoc]

Thanks so much for responding. While I'm also suspecting the Credant encryption may be causing my problem, I don't think the Credant WDE would see the Macintosh's machine serial #. It's Windows software that is run from another computer to encrypt the boot drive of a Windows machine, and it's only encrypting the virtual machine. I don't think it even "sees" the Macintosh (but I must confess I don't know).

The message that comes with the BSOD is

STOP: 0x0000074 (0x0000000000000002, 0zFFFFF880039B09E0, 0x0000000000000002, 0xFFFFFFFFC00000022)

Sorry, I don't know if those are "ones" or "ohs".

I'm flying blind a bit here. The people from the health care enterprise basically told me when we purchased the software that "we don't work with Macs. Epic Care won't run on Macs. Almost every oddity that presented itself during our installation they blamed on the fact I was using a Mac. Of course, many of those gremlins were entirely reproducible on their Dells and HPs, but they still are eager to jump on the "it's the Mac" response to any problem. Our hardware/network guy DOES know Macs, but his knowledge of Credant WDE is limited to knowing how to run it; he doesn't know what it keys on to prevent unwelcome "guests" from using the machine to reach the health care enterprise's server from a laptop.

Does the error message tell you anything?

Again, many thanks for reading and responding.

Jim Robertson

[ColoradoMarmot]

It may very well be the WDE - I know that VMWare had to do some funky things to get PGP working, so it's likely that's the culprit.

Best suggestion is to decrypt the VM on the old machine, and migrate the vm to the new one.  if it works, try re-encrypting it and see if it fails - if so, it's the WDE.