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chouse
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Windows 7 host PC/laptop resets - Intel VT-x and Workstation 8 to blame?

Anbody have this issue? HP EliteBook 8760w, BIOS F.25, 16GB (4x4GB) ram, Intel Core i7-2820QM with Intel VT-x enabled, Win7 Enterprise 64-bit, VMware Workstation 8.0.4.

Laptop resets on me randomly throughout the day, even if i'm using VMs in Workstation 8 or not. Wondering if it's related to having Intel VT-x enabled, and/or having Workstation 8 installed. The laptop just all of a sudden powers off - no lights, and then a few seconds later, turns back on and boots up Windows 7 as usual, like nothing happened. The only sign is an entry in the event log saying "the system shutdown at date/time was unexpected". No BSoD or crash dump or anything. I have set it to not restart automatically when it encounters a crash.

Seen some threads from a year or two ago about folks wondering if Intel VT-x was the culprit for their host system reboots.

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/273918?tstart=0 - mentions changing networking to host-only or none - not an option for me, need connectivity, using NAT for the VMs to access the network.

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/262615?tstart=0

http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Hardware/HP-Elitebook-8760w-restarts-itself/td-p/894523 - mentions changing the power profile to "HP Optimized". This did not make any difference for me.

I have swapped laptops for a same model but different unit, reinstalled Windows without HP bloat, replaced/reduced memory, hard drives, SSD, everything I can think of. Even booted in to Ubuntu 12.04 for a few days and ran with that plus Workstation 8. It was fine, but had to be ditched due to lack of support for the HP Advanced Dock that I was using, and wasn't used long enough to see if it reset while running Ubuntu.

I've upgraded BIOS and will do so again now that I see F.27 is available, but I do not have high hopes.

Anybody else ever seen anything like this?

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

Chris wrote:

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/262615?tstart=0

http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Hardware/HP-Elitebook-8760w-restarts-itself/td-p/894523 - mentions changing the power profile to "HP Optimized". This did not make any difference for me.

I'm not sure what the HP Optimized power profile entails, but you could try specifically disabling Hybrid Sleep, unless this power profile has already taken care of that.

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chouse
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I am on a fresh install of Windows 7 so I don't have any of the HP stuff. Currently using the "Balanced" plan which has "Allow hybrid sleep" set to NO for both On Battery and Plugged in. I'm not too clear what Hybrid Sleep is, but it is off for both battery and plugged-in, for the 3 default win7 power profiles.

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

Well, one way to see if VT-x is the culprit is to disable it in the BIOS (and then power-cycle the system).

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chouse
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Agreed, though I do my primary work in VMs, so doing that is a bit of a pain. But, it's the next thing to try, assuming this F.27 BIOS doesn't make any difference.

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

Are you using Windows Virtual PC (e.g. XP Mode) as well as Workstation 8?

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chouse
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Nope. Fresh basic install of Win7 x64 Enterprise, latest windows updates, nvidia drivers, and Workstation 8.0.4. No XP mode or other hypervisors.

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dariusd
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

How did you go with the F.27 BIOS?  Have you had any more host resets?

--

Darius

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chouse
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I did not on F.27, but got a replacement laptop from work about a day later so couldn't really say. This is the third one I've been assigned. Had it for about a few days now, so far so good, but that doesn't mean anything. The second one I went a month before having the reset. Very sporadic, impossible to reproduce. I've got Intel VT-x enabled right now but don't have Workstation 8 installed. I think the bios on this one is F.25 or F.26 - haven't upgraded and probably won't, unless I see the reset again.

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JoeRaetano
Contributor
Contributor

I'm glad I saw this post... now I know I'm not crazy... well at least in this instance.

I have an Elitebook 8760w, Win7-64bit, 16G ram, Workstation 8.

I've been having issues with the guests locking up, sometimes suspending, sometimes graphics driver crashes, mostly intermittent 3-10 second delays (vmware (not responding))that would drive any human nuts...

I have:

1. reinstalled Win7 twice (Ultimate and Enterprise)... no joy

2. reinstalled Vmware 8 twice... no joy

3. reinstalled all updates, drivers, upgrades...  no joy

4. went through event logs... no joy

5. downloaded and installed the new vmware 9 workstation... no joy

6. looked around for a hammer... no joy... thankfully...

then I saw this post and remembered I had upgraded the bios from F23 to F26.

7. upgraded to F27... no joy....

8. reverted back to F23... no joy...  thinking maybe I should shut everything down, pull batteries wait a minute then restart... I'm at my wits end and not getting anywhere with the work I have piling up....

What's inside Intel, Microsoft, HP? a Hampster???

any suggestions would be great right about now...

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chouse
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I hear you man. I don't have an answer for you. I've had the third 8760w for about 2 months now, with F.26 BIOS. I have Intel-VTx enabled but have not installed Workstation 8 or upgraded the BIOS. So far so good. Not saying it's Workstation though. But the desktop guys have been running my old one for the last couple of months under normal usage (not for VMs) and haven't seen the reset as I described it. In fact, they may not even believe me. But I swear it would reset on me all the time, for no discernable reason. I'm leery of installing Workstation and have been trying to do my VM work on a physical ESXi host instead.

Good luck is all I can really say Smiley Sad

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JoeRaetano
Contributor
Contributor

leads me to question whether or not it was the Workstation 8 upgrade now... hmmmm I'm going to see if I have an older version of Workstation 7 or earlier version of 8...   chasing my tail here... not fun...  I pushed a couple of VMs to my MacAir using a fusion trial for now.  my ram is severly limited, but it works...  The Elitebook works fine without vmware running on it, but once I fire it up for any period of time it gets all wonky... some kind of I/O blocking somewhere that I'm not seeing in the event logs.

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

NMIs (non-maskable interrupts) could cause this kind of behavior, and could be endemic to a particular hardware configuration.  I'm not sure if Windows has a facility for reporting NMI activity, though.

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JoeRaetano
Contributor
Contributor

I started researching non-maskable interrupts based on your note. I only found references for ESX issues and non for workstation.  but this got me thinking to what firmware does this specific laptop have that others don't...  vPro....   I found a firmware pack that I didn't install when I updated thinking that I didn't need it. So I installed: Intel Full Management Engine (ME) 7.0 Firmware Component . I really didn't think this was needed because it "Fixes an intermittent issue where the system does not play PAVP-enabled media such as Blu-ray discs, Intel wireless display (WiDi), or Intel Insider services. - Fixes in intermittent issue where the Intel Identity Protection Technology (Intel IPT) feature is not enabled properly."

was working fine for a while but about 20 minutes into running the vmguest it starts to not refresh, applications lock up for periods between 3-15 seconds, now I'm waiting to see if the graphics driver crashes again.

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JoeRaetano
Contributor
Contributor

which also begets downloading the latest quattro 3000 win7 drivers. perhaps the culprit and delay resides in the host graphics driver. I did see some error/events relating to the graphics.

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JoeRaetano
Contributor
Contributor

Installing the latest Nvidia Quattro driver, no joy... walked away from the guest for a little while and it was suspended when I returned.

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JoeRaetano
Contributor
Contributor

Solved for me:
I've just completed testing the VMs and I've figured out what the delay and suspend culprit is. It's the SATA Bus. it should be running at 3GB/s and should handle the VMs fine since I have my VMs on the storage drive, but doesn't seem to be working correctly. Transferring data from one disk to the other is very slow and I confirmed latest driver. A few weeks ago I tested out the VMs on the system drive to rule this out and for whatever reason at the time (drivers, McAfee,etc) it didn't work so I ruled that idea out and moved on to driver issues. I took one last shot at building a new VM from scratch and used VMware defaults and low and behold the problem seems to be gone since it installed on the system drive. What was I thinking, storing large VMs on the storage drive and leaving the system drive alone....
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chouse
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I'm going to have to chalk my experience up to some unspecified hardware problem. Third 8760w has been rock solid. I had a 128GB SSD that I was using soley for VMs as a secondary drive, but with this third laptop I installed Win7 x64 on the SSD and then after a few months of no issues, installed Workstation 9 and that's been fine too.

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

Yay!

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