Vista - VS2005 guest won't start after applying Windows Update on host....

Help!
Yesterday I got tired of the nagging messages XP displays about
downloaded updates to install on my XP-Pro SP2 host machine. So I
decided to let it do its thing and update my system, which had been
running continuously for 2500 hours at that point.

After the restart my VS2005R2SP1 guest machine (Win2003 Enterprise
Server) won't start!!!!

It is not running after the host system restart even though VS2005 is
explicitly set to start it on system restart.
If I go in with VMRS+ and tells it to start the guest I get an
*immediate* response dialog with this not very helpful message:
"The virtual machine could not be started. An unexpected error
occurred."

In Event Viewer I have these 4 entries related to the system restart
(time sequence):

1: The service principal names for Virtual Server could not be
registered. Constrained delegation cannot be used until the SPNs have
been registered manually. Error 0x8007054b - The specified domain
either does not exist or could not be contacted.

2: Virtual Server successfully started.

3: The service principal name for the VMRC server could not be
registered. Automatic authentication will always use NTLM
authentication. Error 0x8007054b - The specified domain either does
not exist or could not be contacted.

4: An error has occured during the creation of Service Connection
points for Virtual Server in Active Directory. Either a domain
controller is not available to complete the operation or there is a
security problem accessing the domain. This operation will be retried
the next time the service starts. Error 0x8007054b - The specified
domain either does not exist or could not be contacted.

Notes:
1, 3 and 4 talk about domain access, which of course is not possible
on startup because this is a remote computer, which can be manually
connected to the domain via VPN by myself after I have logged on.

If I stop the Virtual Server service and then connect to the domain
using VPN and then start it again I get these log messages:

5: Virtual Server successfully started.

6: The service principal name for the VMRC server could not be
registered. Automatic authentication will always use NTLM
authentication. Error 0x800706ba - The RPC server is unavailable.

7: An error has occured during the creation of Service Connection
points for Virtual Server in Active Directory. Either a domain
controller is not available to complete the operation or there is a
security problem accessing the domain. This operation will be retried
the next time the service starts. Error 0x800706ba - The RPC server
is unavailable.

What can I do?
--------------

To complicate matters the guest has undo disks enabled and there now
exists a regular VHD disk as well as an undo disk, which probably
holds all of the changes since way back....

If I recreate the guest using the original VHD disk I suspect that I
will lose all of the data created the last year or so, which is
unacceptable.
Is there a way to merge the undo disk contents into the main disk so
that it will contain my current data?
I have not noted any way to merge the data in VS2005 similar to the
dialogue for this purpose one has in VPC2007...

--

Bo Berglund (Sweden)

On Sat, 15 Nov 2008 09:11:53 +0100, Bo Berglund <boberglund@xxxxxx>
wrote:
.... event viewer messages snipped ...Feedback:
I got it going again after a lot of fiddling including copying the
whole guest folder and editing the vmc file copy to make a new name
and then attaching this copied guest to the VS2005 and trying to start
it with a different error message.
Then I found what was really happening:

For some reason VS2005 has *forgotten* the password of the account
under which the guest is supposed to run!
I went into the properties of the guest and entered the password
again, then OK-ed out and then used the start button to get the guest
going.
And lo-and-behold! Now it started up just fine!

Why in the world is VS2005 forgetting the account password I have
entered?
And why is the error message so non-descript? Had it said that the
account data was invalid I would not have lost almost a day's worth of
worrying....

--

Bo Berglund (Sweden)

actually Berglund this is a problem I've been having for about a year.
Everytime I have to reboot my host the same issue crops up.

I've seen people suggesting to rebuild the vmc files or deleting and
readding the guests. Those suggestions only work because they wipe out the
account info.

I don't know what to tell you but having it just happen again I'm getting
pretty sick of this error cropping up. And I actually might have a suggestion
(which I will be trying) but thought maybe you had come across the reason for
the issue and if so do you have any additional info?

At any rate my suggestion was to add the account you're trying to have the
guest run under to the "log on as a service" machine security policy.

The policy can be found under Local Computer Policy -> Computer
Configuration -> Windows Settings -> Security Settings -> Local Policies ->
User Rights Assignment.

And to get to there you need to open the Group Policy Editor for the local
machine (run gpedit.msc from the command line).

I'm going to try this now and see if it helps.

e

"Bo Berglund" wrote:

I should also add some other things that I've done to mitigate this problem
(or so I thought):

Under the virtual server properties page, add the user that should run the
guest as to the list of available security accounts.

Also, make sure that the user account that the guests run as are added to
the security ACLs on the folder (and propogated down the folder structure)
and that this account has full control access.



"ekeyser" wrote:

On Tue, 16 Dec 2008 16:18:01 -0800, ekeyser
<ekeyser@xxxxxx> wrote:
Well, the account I have it set to run under is an admin account and
it runs just fine provided that VS2005 does not *forget* what I have
entered as user account/password. So it is *not* caused by limited
permissions on the account itself...

I have no idea why it sometimes do forget, but now at least I know
that this is what is happening and this is not by reading the error
message, which is completely misleading.

Mostly now it starts the guest after a host restart cycle but once in
a while it does not and I have to re-enter the same user info. Quite
tedious.

--

Bo Berglund (Sweden)

On Wed, 17 Dec 2008 07:26:27 +0100, Bo Berglund <boberglund@xxxxxx>
wrote:
Again it happened:
- I had a Win2003 guest running patiently on my XP-Pro SP2 host
- Microsoft thought that I should update my host system with essential
security updates...
- After this was done the dialog told me it needed to restart the
system
- I let it do this and when it came back up agin I checked what had
happened to my guest (I gave it 5 minutes first)

Result: The guest was off, not started!

So I had to start it manually even though it is set up to start
automatically when VS2005 starts up. Fortunately this time the manual
start worked so I have it running now.

Really annoying.

Is there a difference in restart actions if the restart is caused by
Windows Update compared to if I just do the restart manually from the
Start menu????

--

Bo Berglund (Sweden)

On Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:54:30 +0100, Bo Berglund <boberglund@xxxxxx>
wrote:
maybe that's why they say XP is for non-production use only.

I don't restart my W2k3 server with VS on it, but whenever I have the
VMs always start up automatically.
I think we talked about this before. My server is on a domain

--
Cheers,
Steve Jain, Virtual Machine MVP
http://vpc.essjae.com/