My cure for VMware "STOP: 0x0000007B" error

One of the grievances of upgrading to Ubuntu Gutsy was the breaking of VMware. Apparently there isn’t a vmware-server package in Ubuntu Gutsy as opposed to Feisty. A quick download and compile of vmware-server 1.04 from VMware.com and VMware-server was back in a breeze. On the other hand, booting into my disk partition was an absolute pain in the ass.

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The way I setup my vmware, apart from the usual virtual disk images, was to use a real physical partition for the Windows installation. One of the main reasons was because my laptop only came with a software restore and it refused to work within vmware to a virtual disk. The other reason is that it would allow me to dual boot into my XP while also being able to boot into that same XP via vmware from Linux.

The Problem

Whenever I attempted to boot in to XP in VMware, it would give me a BSOD with the following message;


A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.

If this is the first time you've seen this stop error screen, restart your computer. If this screen appears again, follow these steps:

Check for viruses on your computer. Remove any newly installed hard drivers or hard drive controllers. Check your hard drive to make sure it is properly configured and terminated. Run CHKDSK /F to check for hard drive corruption, and then restart your computer.

Technical information:

*** STOP: 0x0000007B (0xF8958640,0xC0000034,0x00000000,0x00000000)


The Solution

Thanks to http://communities.vmware.com/message/288743 for the hints.

Seems like in the kernel 2.6.22 used in Gutsy, all PATA drives are now treated like SCSI drives because the kernel devs found out that the SATA/SCSI driver handles PATA drives better than the PATA driver. So when you add new hard drive to a vmware virtual machine, it configures it as a SCSI device and tell Windows on booting up to treat it as a SCSI device.

Hence the solution in short is to simply go to your vmx file and change all references to your PATA hard drive from SCSI to ide. And then go to the .vmdk file for your raw disk containing the XP installation and change ddb.adapterType="ide”