VMWare Horrible Customer Support

[ron66]

Anyone else finding waiting days for an email response to issues is just a LITTLE frustrating? There is no telephone customer support and calling the head office in California is a waste of time.

I use my computer for my business and having windows fail because I updated Fusion from version 1.1.2 to 1.1.3 is beyond annoying and costing me time and money. This is not the first problem Ive had with Fusion. Has anyone heard of any legal actions against VMware?

Ron Bedard

Vancouver, BC

ph. 778-882-4440

[kristein]

Do you see any error message, if yes send the screen shot of the error window

[ron66]

I have attached it....

[ron66]

When I try to start windows... its starts with the windows xp startup page and then flashes to the attached error message screen for a second and then starts with the windows xp startup page again... it will do this for hours... windows wont start

[RDPetruska]

#1. Did you change anything in your VM's configuration?

#2. Have you read through Microsoft's knowledgebase articles on this error? See here.

Try starting Windows in Safe Mode. Click your mouse into the VM's window immediately after powering on, and just after the BIOS finishes POSTing, hit the F8 function key for Windows' boot menu. Select Safe Mode. You may also want to disable automatic restart.

[ron66]

I havent changed a thing

Its makes no difference if I start in safe mode or not. I get the same blue screen with error message

[WoodyZ]

Have you tried replacing the file in question?

Also you do not need to attach the image of the error multiple times, once is enough and we all can see it.

[RDPetruska]

OK. Have you tried any of the fixes in those multiple articles on MS's site regarding that error c00000221?

[ron66]

WHOAAAAAAAAAAAA...

1. ok all that microsoft said was to reinstall windows or replace the corrupted file... If I reinstall windows it will take me almost a week to reinstall all the mapping software I have installed through windows.

2. Is this what is required to update VMWare software??????? Doesnt anyone else see the problem with this methodology or approach to customer updates?

3. Where would I find a replacement copy of the said corrupted file then what????

[ron66]

Not a thing... All I did was do the update and then windows wont start

[ron66]

Can I use time machine to replace a file that has been corrupted by the update?

[ron66]

Can I use time machine to find the corrupt file????

[patje57]

Did you contact VMWare support directly? Mentioning legal actions in your first post on the issue isn't really motivating for them either...

[ron66]

Yes I did contact VMWare directly... I spoke to the california office (got their automated voice service).. spoke with the canadian office who forwarded me to the automated voice service. Spoke with an outsourced worker who suggested I redo my serial number under lisencing, have reinstalled vmware 5 times including the old version (1.1.2) twice and still no resolution. Have posted a thread on this message board yesterday (see "HELP! Updated to 1.1.3 etc etc) and then again this morning (which is this thread). VMWare is costing my business time and money.

If legal action is required to get customers the service that a large corporation is obliged to provide, it wouldnt be the first time thats what it took.

Ron

[Bob_Zimmerman]

2. Is this what is required to update VMWare software??????? Doesnt anyone else see the problem with this methodology or approach to customer updates?

You apparently don't realize that you are evidently the first person to be affected by this issue. I don't know how many times 1.1.3 has been downloaded or installed, but your posts are the only ones on the forum about this issue. Thus, this is not the result of a "methodology or approach to customer updates", it is probably a result of something weird in your environment.

I do tech support for a living (for a separate company), and this is a huge perceptual issue that people in general have. People tend to assume that if they are running into an issue, so is everyone else. Very frequently, this is not the case. At this time, yours is the only report I have seen of this issue occurring alongside a VMware update.

Now, do you have any backups of the VM?

Do you have any snapshots of this VM?

What version of xp is this? Home, Pro, MCE, MCE 2005, Tablet, Tablet 2005, Enterprise, x64, or one of the rarer versions?

What exactly did you do? You mentioned that you updated to 1.1.3, but did you also update Tools in the guest or anything like that?

What version of Mac OS X are you on?

When you open VMware Fusion's Preferences, which radio button is selected under "Performance"?

This sounds almost like some kind of corruption of the VMDK. I'm pretty sure VMware updates don't touch anything inside the guest unless you tell them to. A corrupted VMDK would neatly explain the apparently corrupted file without requiring the VMware update to touch anything on the guest. How that would happen is anyone's guess.

[jegbook]

Have you tried googling "normaliz.dll"? The first hit I get is this link:

There are many other links related to issues stemming from this file. It may be impossible to ever know, but it may just be coincidence that the upgrade and the error occcurred at the same time (maybe your last shutdown before the upgrade didn't complete correctly, corrupting the file?).

In my experience with virtualization software (not super extensive, older versions of VPC and most recent VPC 7 and now Fusion), errors like this are often Windows issues that are unrelated to the fact that Windows is running virtually.

You should be able to download the file and replace it in the VM file and see what happens.

Good luck!

[ron66]

how and where do i install this .dll file????? Windows wont start up.

[ron66]

how do you find the system 32 folder in windows when it is virtualized on a mac????????

[ron66]

Bob

Bt the way, other people have had issues as well... thats the biggest fallacy of customer support. Because "Customer Support" only hears of an issue once, doesnt mean it has only happened once. Go to The mac store here in Vancouver. I just came back and it looks like i will have to install all of vmware, delete windows and reinstall everything all over...... mine isnt the only to have brought back to the store because of vmware issues... even the mac store can not get in contact with VMware and are limited to these "Help" forums..... is that customer service?

[jegbook]

Ack.

You make a good point. I've run Fusion with my Boot Camp partition, so haven't dealt with fully virtual machines. VPC had a built-in tool for mounting virtual hard drives as one would mount a .dmg, and this is what I was thinking of. Apparently, Fusion doesn't have this built-in.

The Windows Workstation software appears to have Workstation DiskMounter to mount .vmdk (virtual hard drive) files, but you'd have to run that in Windows. It's also likely that it wouldn't support .vmdk files created by Fusion.

The only other thing I can think of is to create a new VM, install Windows on it, then in the Settings of the new VM, attach the .vmdk file of your original Windows installation to the new VM. The .vmdk file is inside the .vmwarevm package. Once this is in place, the idea would be that the virtual hard drive that you are trying to fix would mount as a second hard drive in your new Windows VM. Once mounted in the new Windows VM, you could replace the .dll file.

Obviously, a fair amount of work (well, only about an hour to install Windows. If you make an .iso image file of your Windows installer disk, the Windows install can actually run in like 15 minutes or less since accessing the install files at hard drive speeds is obviously much faster than CD read speed). Once you have a second VM going, it's pretty quick to add the .vmdk file to the new VM as a second hard drive. Though, the docs do say this causes the .vmdk file to be competely copied to the .vmwarevm package that it's being mounted in. The copy of the virtual hard drive would likely take a few mintues as it is likely many GBs big.

I suppose you might need to monkey things a bit to get the "fixed" .vmdk file back into the original .vmwarevm file. I haven't done this, so I don't know how flexible fusion is about swapping in and out the .vmdk files within the .vmwarevm package provided the .vmdk file keeps the same name.

Don't how much sense all that made. It's all theory.

(I happened to have .iso image of a an XP Pro SP2 installer CD on my HD and just installed Windows in 14 minutes, 5 minutes from "power on" to first reboot (after the blue screen stuff), then 9 more minutes (where Windows starts off saying 39 minutes...) to second reboot after configuration. Not too shabby. I also confirmed the ability to mount a second .vmdk file inside my newly created WinXP VM).

Anywho, good luck!