Constant BSOD in XP Guest

[Semper_Securus]

I just upgraded to VMWare WS v7 for linux and am finding that all my old XP guest VMs regularly blue screen with Kernel errors after running for about 20-30 minutes. In safe mode, I was seeing disk errors in the logs.

So I tried to re-create XP guests from scratch via a custom install where I selected IDE and for the entire disk to be allocated at once. Now I get various type of BSOD during the install process. Sometimes it's 'REGISTRY_ERROR", other times PAGE_FAULT, etc.

Basically I can't run any XP guests in VMWare WS v7. I had no problems at all under 6.5. I'm starting to wonder if it could it be something with ext4 fs on my host not being properly handled by VMWare?

Anyone have any ideas as to what might be causing this problem?

Thanks!

[cdc1]

Would it be possible for you to shrink one of your filesystems (/home, for example,) and create a new one as ext3 and place your VM in it to test your "ext4-might-be-the-cause" theory?

[Jackrh]

Possibly unrelated, since I'm running on a Vista 64 host, but since I upgraded to Workstation 7 a month ago, I've had 3 BSOD and 2 VMWare unrecoverable errors. All were in XP VMs, and I had been using all of these for a year before the upgrade without any errors.

[Semper_Securus]

OK, I reinstalled my Ubuntu 9.10 host with ext3 rather than ext4. Now all works perfectly.

I'm not sure if it's VMWare7 that is having trouble with ext4, or if it's the Ubuntu version of ext4 under 9.10 that is causing the problem.

In any case, with ext3, I do not experience any BSOD problems with XP guests under VMWare7 with a linux host.

[PSware]

I'm experiencing the same symptoms launching WinXP guest inside Workstation 7.1.2 on Ubuntu 10.10 with its default ext4 filesystem. The WinXP guest runs fine off NTFS USB HDD or from a Windows host.

[tmalkus]

I have the same problem. A did a fresh install Kubuntu 10.10 with ext4 on my Thinkpad. I copied a XP and Windows 7 guest to the ecryptfs on top of ext4. With both guests I got permanently BSOD. I copy the XP guest to a new directory without ecryptsfs. This runs fine. Okay, I think, it's the ecryptfs. But the Windows 7 guest has always on the ext4 BSOD. I moved the windows7 guest to an external USB-Disk, with ext3. The same machine is running fine and without problems.

The same guests are running fine on my desktop machine, also with ext4, but Ubuntu 9.04.