Vista - Challenging VPC 2007 question - I believe...

Hi everybody,

I have the following issue and hope that somebody can give me a hint about what might be going on!

My system has two raid 1 arrays - one is running on XP Professional SP3 the other one is running on Vista x64 Ultimate SP1.

When I start my virtual machines (either from the Virtual PC console or when double-clicking the *.vmc files) than everything is working fine on XP and the virtual machines are booting and running as expected.


However, on Vista the following is happening (and I hope somebody has an idea):

1. Starting the Virtual machines from the console leads to an immediate reboot of my host machine (I can't even see any boot screen of the virtual machine - it is like clicking start in the VPC console -- > reboot of host).

Now I tried the following:

- (enabling, disabling) hardware virtualization
- changing and disabling network adapters that the VPC uses
- changing the allocated memory
- enabling / disabling UAC

but nothing helps.


2. When I start the virtual machine from its folder (on partition J of the other (xp) raid 1) then everything works fine and the virtual machine doesn't cause the host to reboot!

Again, from the console it dies - what can this be?

I have a DELL M90 with Vista x64 Ultimate SP1 which doesn't have these problems - so this means perhaps that it is a hardware related problem (but then it shouldn't work at all) or it doesn't like the drivers for Vista (as it runs fine under XP in comparision).

I appreciate any suggestions....

Regards

Patrick

OK - I tried now installing Virtual PC 2007 SP1 which supports also Vista SP1 as a host and the problem got worse.

Almost everytime I start a Virtual machine (also saved state) the host immediately reboots! Let's say only every 5th to 8th attempt the virtual machine actually boots without rebooting the host machine.

Since I don't even get a bluescreen or a dump file - can anyone help me and tell me how to disable the machine reboot and instead seeing a bluescreen or anything that helps me finding out why the host dies immediately when starting a virtual machine.

Many thanks

Patrick

On host, uncheck the box: system -> advanced system settings -> Startup and Recovery: settings button -> System Failure: "Automatically restart". That way you get to see the BSOD when the computer crashes. Hope this helps.

Are the virtual computers created on the host that crashes? Have you tried to remove the client computers from VPC console and then re-add them? I have a bit of experience with VPC 2007 SP1 on Vista Ultimate SP1, but haven't yet seen such behavior.

First of all - sorry it took so long to answer - I was on holidays....


Thanks for someone getting back to me regarding this question..... :-)

I figured this with the unchecking "Automatically restart" myself a couple of days after posting the question, but it doesn't even do a BSOD - it just restarts - that suggests to me a pretty nasty hardware conflict ..... Funny thing is the machine is extremely stable and works like a charme, no matter what I am doing.... its only the damn VPCs.

No, the machines were not created on the machine I am using, but again on the other raid which boots XP everything runs pretty good.

I also tried re-adding them etc. no difference.

But, what I did do before holidays was installing windows 2003 x64 on a seperate drive and guess what - same problem. Some 64bit specific thing must cause the trouble on my machine - most likely to be a driver (I guess), but removing drivers etc. didn't help to narrow it down - basically I am really stuck at the moment and have to use my XP, which means 1 gb less to use - what a shame.....

Regards

Patrick

Hi Patrick,

Have you tried installing a Guest in Vista?

Hi dmex,

I tried to install windows 2003 and xp home from my msdn universal and the behaviour is the same under my vista host - as soon as I see the memory test of the guest the host instantly reboots every now and then...., and again - doesn't happen under XP as host.....

Thanks anyway

Regards

Patrick

What's your video card?

A Geforce 8800GT with the latest WHQL certified Vista X64 driver....

I have pretty much the same.. 8800 GTS running on 175.19 driver pack on Vista x64. No probs at all. If the virtual computers you're running are not too private/sensitive, I can test one on my computer

Try using VirtualBox, If you can successfully install a VirtualMachine using that then we will know its only caused by VPC2007...

Steven