Monday, May 27, 2013

BSOD in VMware 4.1 when booting with WinPE 4.0 images

Last month I did a new ConfigMgr 2012 SP1 installation. When using ConfigMgr boot or capture images on VMware 4.1 a blue screen of death (BSOD) was showed. Because I created the boot images manually, I wasn't sure if it was the WinPE 4.0 boot images or VMware. It turned out it was VMware 4.1 after all. Just use the solution below to make it all functional again.


Shutdown the VM first and copy this BIOS file in it: http://communities.vmware.com/servlet/JiveServlet/download/2139717-98102/bios.440.rom

Then edit the VMware configuration (vmx) file and add the following lines in here:
bios440.filename = "bios.440.rom"
mce.enable = "TRUE"
cpuid.hypervisor.v0 = "FALSE"
vmGenCounter.enable = "FALSE"

That's all needed. WinPE 4.0 (which is Windows 8) will work in a older VMware environment from now on also!

Thanks to Roel Janssens (@roeljanssens) for helping me out!

2 comments: