Cannot start copied VM after later version of VM had blue screen error STOP 0x0000005 - BIOS not fully ACPI compliant.

[benperrier]

Hi all,

I am facing a blue screen issue that appears unrecoverable in my VM: at startup, the system prompts to start in normal/safe mode and whichever way ends up with the blue screen and restarts. This happened after I was prompted to install VMWare v 6.0 while the VM was starting up - I clicked yes and it suddenly shut down. From then on the blue screen error appeared.

When this happens, we usually download another version of the VM that is currently working on another station and it boots up straight away.

But when trying to bootup a working version, the blue screen error is still there. Usually, VM folders are standalone entities that can be exchanged and will work on other machines, but not this time - I tried with 2 other working versions of the same VM.

It looks like VMWare player is using some sort of cached files, reproducing the error no matter what version of the same VM is started.

So in essence, I would like a tip on :

- Either how to clear whatever is cached with VMWare player - reinstallation did not give a fresh start and the error was still there.

- Or how to solve that blue screen error - booting up from the disk did not succeed and I could not access the recovery console.

More information:

- Trigger: This error happened after prompted to install VMWare v 6 while machine was starting up. I clicked yes and the machine shut down suddenly.

- OS: windows XP pro - Other VMs using windows XP work on my machine - other projects' VMs.

- Host machine OS: Windows 7.

Logs analysis:

- According to the logs, the following files are missing: Windows XP Professional.vmx, Windows XP Professional.vmdk

- These files are actually there in the folder of all 3 machines I tried.

I have attached the error and the logs to this post.

Any tip would be greatly appreciated

Kind regards

Ben

[VM0Sean]

Anyone?

We had the same problem.

I've heard it has to do the IDE/AHCI mode for the hard drives, and some people even reported enabling/disabling serial ports to fix it.

I've also heard of deleting the c:\hiberfil.sys in case that exists.

[VM0Sean]

We solved it in our case.  The VM still had hardware compatibility v6, upgrading it to v9 caused the problem to go away.

[Jinson]

Same here. Had the exact same BSOD after switching to VMware Workstation Player 12 from VMware Workstation 8. My Windows XP VM kept giving the BSOD and restarting.

All i did was to change the hardware compatibility from 6 to 9 in the VMX file and it worked

[OceansBlue]

What are the steps of changing the hardware compatibility?

[rswaroop]

Open the VMX configuration file and edit following parameter from 6 to 9

virtualHW.version = "9"