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Blue Screen Booting to VHD–You May Be Out Of Space On The Underlying Drive

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When you are using Boot to VHD you must have enough capacity on the underlying disk to fully expand the VHD.  If you do not have enough capacity you will get a blue screen (aka Screen of Death).  If you have this problem, try booting to a windows 7 or windows Server 2008 DVD.  When you get to the first screen (asks for keyboard) press Shift-F10 to drop to a command prompt.  Look for the underlying drive…

Dir c:

Dir d:

dir e:

dir f:

etc… until you find the underlying drive.  Once you find the drive, make sure the VHD file is not read only using the attrib command

Attrib e:\path\filename.vhd

If there is an “R” to the left of the file, you will need to change it using the following command…

Attrib e:\path\FileName.vhd –R

Why would it be read-only?  Looks like windows may mark it as read-only if a boot fails due to out of disk space?  If it was not read-only, look for files on that physical drive you can delete (you may also want to have an extra USB drive plugged in so you can move the files to that USB drive instead of deleting).

Using Diskpart  you can (usually) mount the VHD to manipulate the contents of the VHD.  You can confirm that the capacity available on disk is the problem. If you cannot mount using disk part (you get “access denied” message)

Commands to mount… from the command prompt

Diskpart <ENTER>

This will launch DiskPart utility. You will need the drive letter, path and filename of your VHD file.  you can get this by doing a series of dir commands as indicated above.  replace the drive, path and filename of your vhd file in the command below.  You can eliminate the path if it is on the root of the drive… At the DISKPART> prompt…

Select VDISK FILE=E:\MyPath\YourFileName.vhd            << This opens the VHD (full drive and path to the file are required)

LIST VDISK                                                                       << This lists the drive.  The * means it is selected

ATTACH VDISK                                                                << if you get Access is denied the disk cannot be expanded

Exit                                                                                      << Exit from diskpart utility

 

If you have confirmed you cannot mount the disk, you will have to change the size of the vdisk or move some files off the underlying disk to get the machine to boot.

Another Tip…  You can open two (or more) command windows at the same time by clicking on the background installation screen and pressing Shift-F10 again.  This way you can be at a command prompt and in diskpart at the same time. 

Yet Another Tip… You can run bcdedit from the command prompt to list all all of the boot configuration data which may help you find the drive and path of your vhd.

Happy Hunting Smile

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  • Anonymous
    August 30, 2011
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