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Panda 5888

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Windows 7 VM unable to boot up after shutdown

Environment : VMware
Virtual Machine : Windows 7 VM which has gone through rolling upgrade from Windows 2000 to XP then to Vista and finally to Windows 7
Issue : After the rolling upgrade from Windows Vista to Windows 7, the windows installation always getting corrupted once shut down the VM. Not able to boot normally or boot from safe mode. Cannot restore from restore point also. Only way is to revert back Vista snapshot and perform the rolling upgrade again.
By the way, this issue only happens when shutdown the VM. No issues if restart the VM.

Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.
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ThomasMcA2

Are there any errors in the VMware log?
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I am surprised you haven't had all kinds of issues with that many upgrades.... You have beat the odds. Have you tried cloning the system to see if you have some corruption in the virtual disk file?
time for a fresh install imo...
probably the software has wrong, or corrupted drivers or system files
Hi,

This sounds a like torture test for MS upgrades! I'm amazed it has worked too.
I agree with nobus and say it's going to be nicer experience all around and just do a fresh install of W7 and install any software you need.

You could spend days and days trying to figure it out and life's too short.
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Jackie Man
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I am surprised you haven't had all kinds of issues with that many upgrades.... You have beat the odds. Have you tried cloning the system to see if you have some corruption in the virtual disk file?

We have tried cloning the system and try boot the clone VM. But, the problem still persists.
The cloned VM Windows also got corrupted and unable to boot up.
Since a cloned system also fails to boot it looks like you have corrupted system files and not a corrupted file system, unless you did a snapshot clone and not a full independent clone....

The other thing it could be is some driver or service that is just not compatible with the VM driver package.
The problem still persists. Once shutdown VM, cannot boot into OS anymore.
Tried to boot into safe mode. Stuck at loading agp440.sys.
Disabled graphics adapter in device manager as per suggestion in online forums.
But, still cannot boot into Windows 7 OS.
We are unable to fresh install the OS because the program installers are not available.
These are critical programs for daily operation.

Any other suggestions?
Has this been a VM for all OS's?
If not, do you know which OS it was virtualized from?

If its been a vmware vm for a long time, did you try upgrading the vmware hardware level?
Yes. All the upgrade is done on single VM.
Starting from Windows 2000 to XP to Vista and to Win 7.

I also tried sfc /scannow file system repair in Windows Vista before upgrade to 7.
The result is "Windows resource protection found corrupt files and successfully repaired them".

Then I upgraded to Windows 7 and performed the sfc /scannow.
The result is "Windows resource protection did not find any integrity violations".
After this I tried to shutdown and power on the VM. But, the result still same - Cannot boot up or restore from previous restore point.
Maybe the hardware layer is still a very old vmware version... The hardware emulation has been upgraded in vmware several times, and maybe yours is too old to run windows 7... Since you say the vista image runs ok, you can try and clone it, and upgrade the virtual hardware layer before trying a windows 7 upgrade... It is worth a try...
Thanks, Scott Silva.
I will comment here after try your method.