VMWare x64 support disappears and Dell BIOS
Background: A dell XPS 630i running 8gb of DDR2 hosts my VMWare Workstation 6.5 Lab.
One fine day I come home to find my host desktop in an off state. Hmm that's strange, no warnings on my UPS. Boot up is very slow. No errors in the EventVwr just unexpected power failure. Hmm. <shrug>
Uh oh. Booting up a virtual server in VMWare has it stuck in an infinte loop. The following Warning:
This machine does not support x64 Virtualization. please enable or view this KB: www.vmware.com/info?id=152
Umm what? This computer is x64 and was working great a few hours ago.
The KB article mentions a VMWare tool to tell if your system is x64 and has VT extensions enabled... except.. it doesn't run on an x64 Operating System. well that's not useful. Luckily microsoft comes to the rescue.
Microsoft® Hardware-Assisted Virtualization Detection Tool
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0ee2a17f-8538-4619-8d1c-05d27e11adb2&displaylang=en
The HAV detection tool helps you check if the computer processor supports hardware virtualization. The tool also checks if this feature is enabled on the processor.
This showed me that the virtualization was not enabled in the BIOS.
Okay, restart
- F2 to BIOS
- Virtualization is Enabled
- Restart, still slow windows boot.
- Run havdetectiontool.exe again. Still not enabled.
Restart again
- F2 to BIOS
- Disable virtualization
- Load windows (still slow)
- havdetectiontool.exe. yep still disabled. well thats consistent.
One more time Restart,
- F2 to BIOS
- Enable Virtualization, Save and Exit.
- Hey this is new, whole PC turns off.
- Power Button, boot, windows loads super fast (Yea)
- Run havdetectiontool.exe hey everything is enabled now.
Open VMWare, all great and working normally again.
Moral of the story, don't believe your dell BIOS <grin>. Sometimes you have to disable and then renable for a setting to be correct.
Update: Still no idea why the PC had a powerfailure.