XP crashed after upgrading Fusion!! agp440.sys error? Any help appreciated!!

[Spencebot]

I'm running fusion for Accounting and Architectural Home Design software. I recently added tools and upgraded to 2.0 because I wasn't getting the optimal 3D from the virtual machine and I need it all to use my design program effectively. My design program prompted me to upgrade my drivers saying it was using the windoes defaults.

Now XP won't start and my screenshot is months ago.

I get the black screen saying " We apologize for the inconvenience, but windows did not start successfully...."

In safemode, I get " ......agp440.sys" and then it returns to the black screen.

I'm guessing the adjustments I made caused this and I tried to downgrade the machine and restart, but no luck.

I'd like to fix and restart XP, or at least recover my files and reinstall.....

Can anyone help?

[admin]

Hi Spencebot,

Welcome to the VMware Fusion Forums. I'm sorry to hear about your troubles. I'd like to gather a little more information about your situation. If you attach the Support Information as well as the stop code associated with the crash.

To gather the Support Information, with Fusion open, click on Help and choose Collect Support Information. This will save a .tgz file to your desktop. Attach that in your next post.

As well, when you see the Blue Screen crash, you'll notice at the bottom an error code that looks like STOP 0xA123000045 or something along those lines. I'm assuming it's brief so you may need to restart once or twice to fully write down what it says.

Thanks,

Eric

[WilliamReid]

Are you able to provide a screenshot of the actual error?

[Spencebot]

Here are the support files and error codes:

Thanks

[admin · Accepted solution]

You could attempt to do a windows repair. To do this first you need to download the scsi driver floppy so that windows setup will see your hard disk. you can download that here

Create a backup of your virtual machine bundle incase anything goes wrong so you can still restore your files. you can do this by right clicking on the Virtual Machine in question from the Virtual Machine Library and selecting "Show in finder" then right clicking on the package that is displayed and selecting duplicate.

Add a floppy drive to your virtual machine by going to Virtual Machine > Settings > Other Device.

Mount the floppy disk image you downloaded on the same screen.

Mount your Windows ISO or put the Windows disk in the drive and make sure the CD drive is connected by checking in Virtual Machine > Settings >CDs & DVDs.

As soon as your virtual machine starts up press ESC to get the boot menu and select to boot from the CD-ROM Drive. If you can't hit esc fast enough add a delay to the bios screen by adding the following line to your .vmx file.

bios.bootDelay = "5000"

Let the setup load and the first time you see the Repair don't select Repair but press Enter instead. You will get another screen that says "If one or more of the following Windows XP installations is damaged, Setup can try to repair it. Press R here.

Go through the Windows setup wizard and hopefully when it finishes Windows will boot.

If that doesn't you can right click on the Package that you backed up in step 1 and select Open with> VMDKmounter. The disk from your Virtual Machine will be mounted and you can get at the files you need for your new Virtual Machine.

Let me know if you need any clarification on any of these steps. Good luck.

[Spencebot]

Tried everything you wrote and it went through all the steps except on reboot it displays "NTLDR is missing- press any key to restart"

If you press any key the message appears again....

thanks for the help- do you have any further suggestions?

spencer

[Spencebot]

I tried everything and after XP went through setup- it restarted with this message "NTLDR is missing- press any key to restart" The message repeats itself if you press any key....

I also tried to open the duplicate with VMDK Mounter and it wouldn't open- saying, " It is not safe to mount the virtual disk. It may be attached to a suspended or powered on VM, or it may be inside a snapshot chain "

thanks for helping- do you have any further suggestions?

spencebot

[admin]

It could be because the floppy is still connected. Try disconnecting the floppy drive and see if it will startup then. If that doesn't work try re adding the floppy then try this. This time your going to press R for repair the first time you can

Boot with your XP CD in the cd drive. Select 'To repair..' by pressing 'R'. When in the Recovery Console type the following:

"copy X:\i386\ntldr C:\" - without the quotes. Where X is the

letter of your CD drive and C is the letter of your system drive. Take

the XP CD out of the cd drive and reboot into XP normally.

Do you have any snapshots on your virtual Machine? If so you could possibly just restore to a previous snapshot from before the error occured? check the rollback and snapshots options from the Virtual Machine menu.

Also you can't have the virtual machine powered on when your trying to mount it so try shutting down the original Virtual Machine by going to Virtual Machine Power down then try mounting the disk with VMDK mounter and see if that works

[Spencebot]

WORKED! I disconnected the floppy and the computer went through startup....at first I was concerned because I had to reenter the registration key, and it seemed like it was going to reinstall without any of my old files. Then it froze during registration and I had to restart the machine- this time using the "power off" because nothing else was responding. Figured it was dead, but it started back up to where I left off and I took a screen shot!!

Now I'm back to where I started when this whole thing happened....an unrecognized graphics driver which limits the 3D in my architectural program.

New Question- do I install Tools and try to enable the 3D?

thanks again- happy to have my files back!!

[admin]

Glad to hear it. I would make sure you have another backup of all your files incase anything else happens then try it again. Completly uninstall VMware Tools then reboot your Virtual Machine 2 times then install tools again. If you have an ATI video card you will want to update to Mac OSX 10.5.8 first otherwise the 3D acceleration will not work right.