Roger Mills wrote:
I have a Virtual XP setup for running a few legacy programs which won't
run on W7-64bit. It's on a laptop running W7-PRO 64.

It's been ok for several years, but today it won't start. It puts up the
usual little window saying "Starting Virtual Machine" and the progress
marker starts moving to the right and when it's got about one third of
the way across after about 40 seconds, the window closes - and that's
that. No error messages or anything. At the point when it closes, I
would expect it to say "Starting integration functions" - or something
like that - but it doesn't.

I've re-booted numerous times to no avail. Malwarebytes doesn't find
anything amiss.

Anyone got any suggestions what to try next?

TIA.

Well, that's a good one. I don't know of any fancy tricks
right off hand.

If it would accept F8, you could try some Safe Mode or
BootLog type stuff. (Not that BootLog is actually useful.)

You could try V2P, and bring it back out to a regular
disk drive. Again, I don't know what the point of that
would be. With activation issues, it's just as likely
to foul up in P land, as for the original fault to
manifest.

You would need to find an OS that mounts VHD files. Mount
the drive, then use Macrium and clone it to a Physical Disk.
If it's a VHDX, there might be fewer mount options. For
example, you can use vhdmount (MS) on WinXP (NTFS C: only),
and it can mount a VHD as if it was a disk drive. And then
you could use Macrium Reflect Free to clone it.

I've rescued myself on more than one occasion, with the
full disk backups I do, that happen to capture my circus
collection of VHD files. And I would go back a few months,
and replace it with that. Most of my VMs aren't used that
heavily, so I probably wouldn't lose too much. It would be
different if a VM was a "daily driver", and then my slack
approach to backups would be a disaster. It takes me all day
to back up everything, which is why it doesn't happen every
day. Nevertheless, my backup collection has come in handy
many times, even if it isn't "minty fresh". Like the time
I backed up Windows 7 drive, two hours later, destroying
C: with a little experiment, and having a nice fresh backup
to rescue it with. I had no inkling at the time I made the
backup, that this could possibly happen.

If it wasn't for activation, the options would be a
bit more positive looking.

Windows can shut down, if lsass or csrss are compromised.
If the OS security systems are not happy, the OS will
not remain running. That seems about as good a reason as
any, for the "lights to go out". I would think though, for
that to happen, wouldn't the desktop have to make an
appearance ? I don't know if it's clever enough to shut
down immediately on sight of trouble.

It occurs to me when reading this, that if the system
actually crashed, you could open the VHD virtual machine
file, with 7ZIP. Use the newest version, for most efficient
access (won't bash the page file quite as bad as older
versions could). Maybe you can find the location of the minidumps,
pull the latest .dmp file, and use dumpchk or Nirsoft
BlueScreenView to get some idea what happened.

https://www.ghacks.net/2007/12/27/cs...-and-lsassexe/

Paul