Server 2003 - VMWare Tools Install = Bluescreen

[LE2Strat]

I have a Server 2003 VM in my ESX enviornment that gets a blue screen everytime the VMware tool installer tries to start.

It's not a new VM.  It was a VM that was there before we upgraded our evniornment to ESXi 5.0.  It was running the older copy of VMware tools just fine, but when I went to upgrade it, half way through the install, it blue screened.  When it came back up I decided to just take off the older copy and do a clean install over the new version.  It now blue screens as soon as the installer starts.

I have the crash dump file if people want to take a look at it, but it's to big to post here. I ran it through debugger and it came back with:

Probably caused by : ntkrnlpa.exe ( nt!CcFlushCache+1af )

The virtual hardware has already been updated to Verison 8.  I hope this isn't a trend with our 2003 VMs when we try to perform VMware Tool updates on them.

Anybody have ideas?

[Charlie000]

Hi

i have recently encountered a similar issue, but my vms fail with a win32 error. The way i found to fix this is to just boot into last known good configuration and it works further on without issues

ps - i know it been a while since you posted this issue, but im sure somebody else will have similar problems

[grasshopper]

Thanks for sharing.  In this case, the issue that the OP had (post is a couple years old) was likely due to a combination of factors, most notably though:  VMware Tools must always be upgraded before the virtual hardware.