Trouble booting Vista on raw disk under Linux (dual-boot setup).

[chuck_999]

I am trying to mimic an existing setup I used for the past couple of years (with vmware up to version 5 and Windows XP) on vmware and Vista.

Running vmware workstation 6.0.2 on Linux (debian testing/lenny, amd64 kernel 2.6.22); Vista is "Home Premium Edition." Hardware is HP laptop dv9500t.

I can dual boot to either Linux or Windows. I usually run Linux, and run a vmware session to boot in my Windows partition. If needed, I can reboot to Windows native.

I have dual-boot working perfectly with Linux and Windows Vista, but trying to boot my existing Vista partition in vmware, I see:

A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage

to your computer

...

STOP 0x0000007B (0x80603BA0, 0xC0000034, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)

I have tried both BusLogic and LSI Logic SCSI adaptors.

When I switched to BusLogic, I received a message to see http://www.vmware.com/info?id=43, but that link does not appear to work.

The vmware SCSI drivers from the vmware site appears to be an ".flp" file, which I cannot open in Vista - what format is that file?

I searched for drivers for the 20320 card on www.lsilogic.com, but there are none for Vista.

I tried

http://www.vmware.com/support/ws55/doc/disks_dualmult_ws.html

but this refers of course to Windows XP, which supports hardware profiles -- Vista does not.

I have read and tried

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=36&sliceId...

With no success. I am considering replacing the following drivers inside Vista, but wanted to see if there were any other workarounds I should try first.

Replace "Intel ICH8M Ultra ATA Storage Controllers - 2850 11/15/2006 8.2.0.1011"

with "Standard Dual channel PCI IDE controller"

Replace "Intel 82801HEM/HBM SATA AHCI Controller 2/12/2007 7.0.0.1020"

with "Standard AHCI 1.0 Serial ATA Controller"

Should I replace one or both of those drivers, or should I be looking at something else entirely?

Thanks - Chuck

[Liz]

You have ATA drives, installing SCSI drivers wouldnt have helped.

Id have to think more, but I can see windows throwing a fit in that the guest can only see a single drive, if the disk you put windows on was not the first disk inside the windows it will be looking for disk1 not disk0, as a result, anything once it gets that far will fail.

Simillarly, any other hardware devices could suffer because they arent there any more, its all virtual generic devices.

Finally a .flp file is a kind of floppy image, like an ISO.. I believe VMware

[Liz]

You have ATA drives, installing SCSI drivers wouldnt have helped.

Id have to think more, but I can see windows throwing a fit in that the guest can only see a single drive, if the disk you put windows on was not the first disk inside the windows it will be looking for disk1 not disk0, as a result, anything once it gets that far will fail.

Simillarly, any other hardware devices could suffer because they arent there any more, its all virtual generic devices.

Finally a .flp file is a kind of floppy image, like an ISO.. VMware will mount it as a floppy.. you can write flp files with rawwrite I believe to an actual floppy.

[chuck_999]

I understand my underlying hardware is SATA, but the bus type being presented to the virtual machine was SCSI, which was why I attempted the driver updates.

I found a related post http://communities.vmware.com/thread/113612 which seemed to be a similar situation. Following his advice, I updated my .vmx and .vmdk files from SCSI to IDE and now present the disks as ide0:0 and ide0:1 (rather than scsi0:0 and scsi0:1). Same boot failure.

I have been presenting both physical disks as raw disks to the vm from the very beginning.

I have gone ahead and replaced both drivers so that I have Standard Dual channel PCI IDE controller and Standard AHCI 1.0 Serial ATA Controller installed -- still no good. For the poster above, it seems like what worked for him was changing the vm buses to IDE and updating the Vista driver to Standard Dual channel..., but that doesn't seem to be working the same magic for me.

I found another related case at http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/19711.html which again seemed right up my alley and had great details confirming how to edit the vmx and vmdk files, but I'm still stuck with the 7B stop a few seconds after Vista starts to boot.

Yes, thanks - I've since realized the .flp is the floppy image file you can present to a vm as a floppy disk image. That's definately not going to help me in this case, since I'm not even getting far enough in the boot process to load the image.

[Liz]

Does it give any indication as to which disk is causing the error? eg is it because windows is expecting to get full lock on a disk and youre trying to give it and its the host disk?

Are you sure you presented the disks in the right order?

[chuck_999]

Thanks for the help. I think I'm really close to getting this to work! Just missing one little "thing" somewhere....

Not sure what you mean by "...expecting to get a full lock..." etc. Windows reports the inital stop as a 0x0000007B. If I try to reboot again after that, it prompts me to enter the Startup/Repair tool, which only shows "Windows failed to start... Status 0xc000000f ... Info The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible".

As for presenting the disks, I would expect they are correct, since if I had them reversed, I don't think grub would even attempt to start. To confirm, I just swapped them and sure enough, grub doesn't boot at all.

[chuck_999]

Does anyone have any ideas for the missing piece of the puzzle here?

[charlus]

Hi Everyone,

I'm facing the exact same problem here.

I've got vista installed from manufacturer on /dev/sda , I added another hd /dev/sdc on which I installed a fresh Fedora Core 8 and VMWare workstation 6.0.3

When I try to boot vista from vmware i'm getting the BSOD STOP 7D. I've tried all the tips I could find ( moving scsi to ide ) with no success.

However the difference from what is reported here is that I'm able to run the Vista repair tool, but after a few minutes it tells me it cannot repair the problem

Any other tips ? This is really annoying !

[mickpen]

The 0x7B error denotes missing entries in the registry CriticalDeviceDatabase of the current control set. I have previously done some extensive research into how this affects 2k & XP, the details of which are available here (), I am still researching all of the details for Vista on IDE (I have resolved SCSI issues already in VFC) but have no doubt it will be a similar issue.

Essentially, you need to make sure that the correct disk driver is available (intelide.sys if using ide - valid for xp - still testing for vista) and that the correct entries are also available in the registry to use that driver.

There are methods that can be employed to use vmware-mount / vdk to load the partition and then conduct offline registry editing to patch the registry, some of which are detailed in the above paper.

[charlus]

Thanks for the tip, I'll go through your paper.However I'm wondering if this really is the issue since, if I run the vista repair tool, it tells me it's unable to repair the computer. If the problem is caused by what you say, I guess it should be able to find the ide driver ( right ??? ).

[mickpen]

You would think that running repair would fix it but my experience is that this does not always work, hence the original reason for my research. I confess all of my work has been done only on a windows platform using regedit to do the offline registry editing and making sure the correct entries were present and set to start at system boot but I am sure that similar methods can be used under linux by using a fully installed xp / vista vm in order to modify the registry (unless you know of any linux tools that can edit the windows registry natively).

[Peter_vm]

Can you attach/post "vmware.log"?

[charlus]

here's the log generated during my latest unfortunate try to boot vista .....

[Peter_vm]

Did you try to use virtual disk for Vista instead of physical?

[charlus]

Well that's not an option for me.The vista version I have is an OEM version( pre-loaded on my PC ) and I can only install it with the recovery partition provided

Any other idea on how to proceed with this problem ?

[Peter_vm]

Well that's not an option for me.The vista version I have is an OEM version( pre-loaded on my PC ) and I can only install it with the recovery partition provided

? Virtual disk is just a file. You can't store files under your host Vista?

Or maybe you just want to run the same instance of installed Vista under VMware?

Please clarify.

[charlus]

Yes i want to run the installed vista on vmware. I don't see how i could do anyting else ( what do you mean by virtual disk ? to me a virtual disk is a Linux file on which the target os is installed, as I said I can't do this since I don't have any vista CD,I just have a rescue partition )

[Peter_vm]

First of all there is a danger of corrupting of your physical Vista installation if something goes wrong.

Secondly, I did not see hardware profiles for Vista, so what are you trying to do might be impossible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_removed_from_Windows_Vista

This is because your virtual machine hardware is so different from physical hardware.

[charlus]

Yes I tried to replicate what I had done under XP and found out that hardware profiles are not in Vista anymore ...

Are you telling me that running vista ( installed outside of vmware ) is not supported ???? If so this is really annoying !

Anyone succeeded in doing what I'm trying to achieve ?

[Peter_vm]

Yes I tried to replicate what I had done under XP and found out that hardware profiles are not in Vista anymore ...

Are you telling me that running vista ( installed outside of vmware ) is not supported ???? If so this is really annoying !

Are you saying that working with MS Vista is annoying ????

You can buy and install Vista in virtual machine, no problem. VMware Workstation supports Vista guests.