Blue screen of death during guest OS installation (Ubuntu 20.10 host, Windows 10 Guest)

[MasterJulian]

I have Ubuntu 20.10

Installed VMware® Workstation 16 Player Version 16.1.0 build-17198959

installed kernel module following instructions here

Download Window 10 ISO image version October 2020 from here

Created new virtual machine, selected Windows 10 Education, no product key, increased ram to 8 GB, single file for disk image.

Launched virtual machine.

Get the windows screen that copies the file from the Windows ISO to the disk. Copying the file is completed. System reboot.

Get screen "Getting things ready", with the spinning wheel above. During this screen, I get BSoD - Blue screen of death.

The if I start the VM manually, when Windows is booting a message box pop ups saying that the OS is rebooting unexpectedly. Then I am redirected to BIOS menu.

[RaSystemlord]

Just did this yesterday with Ubuntu 20.04.1 Host and Windows 10 2004 (not exactly the same source for the image).

I would check the following:

- the image. Is it really OK? (check size, extract the files to test, reload from Internet)
- use 2 GB splits for virtual disk. One file is very vulnerable for hard disk failures. You don't really need a single file, unless you have very big files requiring fast access - like a big tablespace file for Oracle use
- do it in two steps (if you didn't do that), first create VM, check settings, second step boot to install OS. This may give you better error messages.

I saw that in VMware, I only have "Virtualize CPU performance counters" selected. This isn't the case with Win7, for instance.

[MasterJulian]

I will try your suggestions. Thank you very much

I have updated my post to reflect exactly where the BSOD happens. A previous version of the post suggested that the BSOD happened after install, while it actually happens during installation

[RaSystemlord]

OK, good if I happened to give a relevant tip.

As for the place where problem occurs, doing the creation of VM in two steps, as suggested above, allows you to check the VM configuration prior to installing the OS. There could be something wrong.

In my case, if I remember right, I had a floppy configured for hardware. I didn't remove it and thus, it didn't do any harm, but that was a bit strange. In CPU hardware screen, there was this one item possible to check (mentioned already above). It was unchecked and I did check that prior to installing OS - not sure, but it might be a requirement for Win 10.

[RaSystemlord]

Did you get the problem sorted out?