"Location is not available" after adding virtual disk

[Manguy888]

Current VM environment: ESX 4.0

Guest OS: Windows 2008 Server

VM info - Virtual Machine hardware 7

VMs are stored locally on the ESX server - no SAN storage, VMotion, etc.

Steps:

1. Create a new virtual disk (which is fairly large - 1.5TB) and attach it to my Guest OS in Edit Settings

2. Log into Guest OS, open disk management and set up new drive

3. Try to explore the drive and get a "Location is not available" window with information "access is denied: G is not available"

We build up multiple identical systems for deployment, we are a production environment, so we have been building this particular Guest OS for a long time and this is the first time I'm seeing this issue. Right before this step, we delete all of the snapshots that we have been using throughout the build process - not sure if there is some relation there.

If anyone could help it would be appreciated- would hate to have to start back from scratch with this server. Unfortunately, since we're in a production environment and the end product is tightly configuration managed, advice such as "upgrade to version X" or "store the VMs in a different location and do Y" cannot be attempted.

Thanks.

[vGuy]

Welcome to the community.

This prolly seems to be a Guest OS issue. Can you try to add a smaller disk and see if it works. Also, see if you can access the disk via Safe mode.

Ensure you have full perms on the drive and that services such as UAC, Encryption are disabled..

[adelisa]

Hi Manguy888,

please check the vxd file and see the rights to guest user ?

" Affirmation without discipline is the beginning of delusion."

[Manguy888]

Thanks for the suggestions.

I found that attaching a smaller drive and also attaching the drive to a DIFFERENT Guest OS on the same ESX server resulted in the same error. Unfortunately I'm seeing the same behavior across the other two ESX servers on this suite, so I can't isolate the problem to one ESX server.

I tried turning off UAC on two guest OSs, rebooting and trying a similar disk attach and I got the same error as well. Frustrating. What's worse is that once this error occurs, if you reboot the Guest OS it will not come up, even in safe mode. It freezes at a black screen with a moveable cursor but nothing else. Thank god for snapshots.

We've done 10+ builds of this type using the same procedure set and have never seen this problem. I'm thinking that the builder might have made a mistake when setting some configurations but since I can't isolate the problem to a single Guest OS or ESX server, I've got a lot of work ahead of me.

As far as the .vxd file, unsure what that is, how I fould find it and what the settings should be on it. I'll do some research

[vGuy]

(Sorry re-read your post and realized the problem is only for couple of VMs)

Can you plz confirm if you are seeing any errors in eventvwr or the vmware.log file (found in /vmfs/volumes/<Datastore Name/<VM Name>/vmware.log)?

Message was edited by: vGuy

[Manguy888]

We finally fixed this problem.

It ended up not being a VMWare issue, at least not directly. I'll put the answer up in case it helps someone down the line.

The following three group policies were each separately causing the fatal error described earlier:

Computer->Policies->Administrative Template->System->Removable Storage

-  Removable Disk: Deny Execute Access

- Removable Disk: Deny Write Access

- WPD Device: Deny Write Access

Something about these policies trigger a corruption when they are applied to a Windows 2008 Server VM and a new drive is introduced and formatted as a Simple Volume. Remove these policies and the problem goes away. Unsure whether the fact that they are virtual disks affects the issue at all, we aren't able to test in a non-virtual environment.

On the errored out system without snapshots, major surgery was needed to repair the 'black screen of death' including copying over backed up registry files.

Thanks for all the help!