‘Unnamed VM’ could not initialize… The security ID structure is invalid (0x80070539)
While working on a system recently, I imported an old virtual machine – which then failed to start with this error message:
What to do? Well – thankfully the solution is already documented here: https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2927313/en-us
But how did this happen? And what is going on?
Well, Hyper-V allows you to grant access to the virtual machine screen for non-administrative users. You can do this using the Grant-VMConnectAccess cmdlet. However, if virtual machine screen access has been granted to a user account that no longer exists, Hyper-V does not handle it correctly.
Now, System Center Virtual Machine Manager uses Grant-VMConnectAccess automatically on all virtual machines. So the easiest way to hit this problem is to take a virtual machine that is managed by SCVMM and move it to a Hyper-V server in a different domain.
Personally, I used a slightly different method than what is documented in the KB article above. What I did was to open a PowerShell window and ran this command:
What am I doing here?
Using Grant-VMConnectAccess to add my current account causes Hyper-V to remove any invalid entries from the access table. However, I do not actually need access (I am a Hyper-V Administrator – so I always have access). Furthermore, if I just run Grant-VMConnectAccess, I will hit this problem again if I move the virtual machine to a host on a different domain. So granting access and immediately revoking it solves the problem and makes sure it does not happen again.
Cheers,
Ben
Comments
Anonymous
September 03, 2014
Nice tip. Thanks!Anonymous
April 07, 2017
Wonderful, worked perfectly..thank you.