I Know The Guy Who Owns This Place

It took a ton of Googling, but I finally figured out how to get past the errors I was seeing trying to launch my Boot Camp partition in Fusion.

When I did a Safe Mode boot of Windows in Boot Camp, I could see that chkdsk.sys was in my way, but I could not figure out how to get it resolved.

Here’s what I ultimately had to do:

• Unplug my external USB drives.
• Boot to the Windows Vista Install DVD. Hold down the Option key at startup to select the CD or a hard drive.
• Start setup
• Choose Repair Your Computer
• Then after letting Vista do its thing, I selected the Command Prompt option and ran the following commands:
  • bootrec /fixboot
  • bootrec /fixmbr
  • chkdsk c: /x /r /f
• That last command (chkdsk) took a loooong time to run on my small boot camp partition.
• I then removed the old Fusion files for Boot Camp so that Fusion would recreate it’s link to the Boot Camp partition.
• I nuked the .plist files for Fusion as well so that I was certain I was getting everything reset as expected.

That still didn’t do the trick though. Now Windows would hang at CRCDISK.SYS when it was loading just in Boot Camp.

So, sadly, I had to resort to some creative workarounds. I ran my old version of Parallels and loading up the Boot Camp partition under that. Once I managed to get that Vista install to boot (and, for like the 10th time, reactivated over the phone), I was able to update the Boot Camp drivers from Apple and bring Vista up-to-date with all it’s patches. (I have no idea why, but installing all those patches under Parallels took nearly 3 hours.)

Once all that was completed, I crossed my fingers and tried starting Fusion again:

• Launched the Fusion app
• Clicked the Settings button for the Boot Camp virtual machine entry
• Reset all my previous VM settings (including the most important with Vista: 4GB RAM

At this point, I got past the infinite “VMWare Fusion is preparing your Bootcamp Partition to run as a virtual machine.” dialog for the first time. More signs of progress!

Success! I finally got back to the Windows Vista login screen under VMware Fusion for my Boot Camp partition. But, of course, that wasn’t a complete success just yet.

After I logged in, the VMware tools installer autostarted, but then complained 4 different processes were in use and couldn’t be updated. It wouldn’t let me choose anything except “Ignore” or “Cancel”, so I blindly clicked “Ignore.”

Well that seemed to be ok for a while, but then the installer failed with “Error 25028.Setup failed to install the VMCI driver.” (Shockingly, Google’ing for that error message comes up empty.” The installer completed otherwise and restarted Windows.

The Windows restart in Fusion then hung before really ever getting to the Windows startup screen. So I selected “Restart Guest” from the Virtual Machine menu. That seemed to get past whatever error it hit and the Windows Vista startup progress bar came back. It ran for a long time, but eventually did get to the login screen again.

This time it really was success. Everything seems to be back up and running.

Unfortunately, it looks like I’m going to have to deal with Windows Activation again since it can’t tell VMWare, Boot Camp and Parallels are all the same Windows Vista install.

This was a pretty long post, but it was incredibly frustrating to get through. Given how much Google’ing I did for answers and didn’t find any one that solved it completely, I thought it was worth it to put my solution out there.

OK, back to now what I really just wanted to do in the first place, reading my work email in Outlook. (Can’t they just make a real Mac email client that works with Exchange? No, Entourage, is not it.)

~ by bryan on May 25, 2009.