Saturday 17 February 2007

Virtual Vista - Blue Screen STOP 0x000000D1

DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL




I was doing some tweaking on our two virtual Vista Business installations. They were both rebooted at the same time, with one BSOD as above.

The system is a new SR2300 with dual 2.8 GHz. Xeons and 6 GB of RAM. Drives are a pair of Seagate SCSIs mirrored by the host OS.

The funny thing is, the other instance just kept trucking. A "reboot" of the virtual machine allowed the instance to boot with no issues.

There is no virtualization tech on this particular machine. So, there could be any number of reasons why it happened. One is an attempt to hit a spot in memory that was already occupied, another being something with the hardware itself.

Some further testing will be in order. Though, in this case the Vista machines are for testing purposes only. We also have two XP Pro SP2 instances on it that are running quite stable. So, time will tell as we tear Vista apart, and put it back together again!

I like that ability with the virtualized OS: Kill it, then kill it again, then kill it again...As long as my original VHD copy is around, I am good to go!

The machines are virtualized on Microsoft's Virtual Server 2005 R2 Enterprise Edition.

Microsoft's take on it: KB 293077 Error Message: STOP 0x000000D1 DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL.

UPDATE 2009-04-01: The above link is now a dud. Here is a link for a search for the stop error on Microsoft's support site: 0x000000D1 Search.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am having the same problem (DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL) with a Windows 2003 server standar edition, the virtual machine is in one usb driver, every time i have this error i lost a couple of hours or work.
After a couple of days of pain, i change to virtual pc 2007 and now is working fine, i would like to know if you or somebody have a solution or theory about this problem.
Thanks.

Philip Elder Cluster MVP said...

I do believe that this is where the new Hyper-V virtualization will make the difference.

The new Hyper-V structure will interact directly with hardware on behalf of the guest OSs. This will eliminate the possiblity of two guest OSs making a call to the same point on some hardware which is what causes the blue screen.

We don't see the error too often, but it does happen.

Philip

Anonymous said...

microsoft site says:
There are no documents that match your search for "293077"

Anonymous said...

You are not the only one guys, to any MS Security people out there, Windows 2000 SP4 also, apparently it was connected to the NTOSKRNL file that attacks the Idle process thread, and if anyone sees this, please take this note to BradBand Reports for it.