VMWare Workstation 12 rendered our Windows 2000 image unbootable

[jgotts]

My employer, NetPOS, has been using this image since VMWare Workstation 8. We're a paying customer. I don't see how to submit bugs, or maybe we have to pay additional money to do so. Let me know what we need to do to do this. This image has approximately 5-6 years work of work invested in it.

1) There is normally an option to "upgrade" your image with every release of VMWare. I always do this.

2) After "upgrading" the Windows 2000 image, we get a blue screen of death. Is there a fix to undo this "upgrade" or to make the image work again?

Windows XP Professional, Vista, and CentOS 4.x "upgraded" just fine.

[We use VMWare to test and in some cases write code for completely obsolete operating systems.]

John

[Susie201110141]

Thanks for posting this issue!

Could you provide your workstation 12 build version and host OS version ?

If possible, please also attach the vmware.log for the win2k professional guest OS.

I will do some investigation. Thanks!

[continuum]

Most probable explanation that would explain a 7b bluescreen:

Very very likely the win2000 VM was originally created with
scsi0.virtualDev = "buslogic"
The buslogic controller would be the default controller when creating a new 2k VM using the wizard.
Now you "upgraded" to a guestOS that is much newer and either you changed the controller yourself or WS did adjust it to fit the new guestOS.
Probably you now have
scsi0.virtualDev = "lsisas1068" or
scsi0.virtualDev = "lsilogic"
Anyway - I bet you can boot the win2000 again as soon as you restore the scsi-controller to the one the VM used before you upgraded.
Suggestion for next time: - forget updating a VM - this may require changes in the vmx that produce result as you see now.

Next time keep the old VM as it is - create a full clone of it. Then adjust the virtual devices yourself and run the upgrade against the clone.
Advantage: the new guestOS gets virtual hardware that you selected yourself and if you specify those details with care BSODs will not surprise you again.
Especially the change from outdated buslogic that only works with 32bit guestOS to lsilogic or lsi-sas can be expected to be problematic.
Some things are simply more tricky inside VMs - I guess that in real life nobody would even try to reuse an old win2000 capable hardware, buy a brandnew scsi-controller and use it with the old board ....
But the same thing inside a VM seems to be so easy that one tends to forget the problems originated by virtual hardware changes.

[continuum]

Oops - there several different possible meanigs of "UPGRADE" in this special case.
Do you get the BSOD in WS 12 if you use the unmodified original vmx-file from WS 8 ?
Or did you allow WS 12 to modify the orignal vmx - you will be asked about this first time you start the original ...

7b bluescreens can be addressed in 3 ways:
- simply modify the vmx-file
- install a different driver inside the guestOS
- worst case: post a feature request to VMware engineers to fix a new bug in the virtual hardware implementation

I have seen a similar issue with e1000 virtual nic for win2003 guests recently - new WS version appeared and none of my win2003 VMs could use the E1000 which usually has a working driver included in the default windows-driver set.
Depending on your case you could try:
- check the vmx and use correct syntax, if you use buslogic, assign to pci -slot on channel 16 and dont add pci-express cards on pcislots 160 or higher
- normally a win2000 VM would use IDE for the desktop version and buslogic for the server-versions. The server versions can then either use the vmscsi-driver or the one for buslogic that comes with Windows - so toggling the driver may help.
- worst case would be if you have to change the controller from scsi to ide.

Please post a vmx-file that produces the 7b bluescreen.

[bonnie201110141]

Hello jgotts,

How did you upgrade your WIndows 2000 image?