Ok, so first I need to give a shout out to John Miller, who read my last post and promptly encouraged me to check out the VMWare Fusion 2.0 beta, which adds a nifty feature called “AutoProtect”.  The idea is to have Fusion automatically save snapshots of your virtual machines as backups for easy rollbacks in exactly the same situation I find myself in now.  Unfortunately, I didn’t upgrade sooner, because it looks like this is one of those “must have” features.  The other neat thing about the 2.0 version is that it now includes the multi-snapshot feature I like so much in the Workstation 6.0 product.  Now we can have the best of both worlds.

Now back to reality.  What to do about the corrupt disk image?  I’ve since learned that the smart guys at VMWare have known about this for awhile and have pinpointed a potential bug in the Mac OS that can cause virtual machines to get fried because of some problem handling unbuffered i/o.  If you’re interested, you can read about it here.  Wish I’d known about this sooner!

First, I decided to upgrade to the 2.0 beta to see if perhaps by some fluke of grace (?), I might get lucky and Windows might magically be restored.  Not hardly.  But I have to say, the new Fusion interface is pretty slick.  Perhaps when I’m sane again, I can do a full treatment of the new features.  Right now, I’m still too wigged out to pay attention to such details.  I need to find a way to recover those lost VS2008 projects I was working on.

The next idea was to create a brand new VM and then try to connect to the old disk, perhaps by adding it as a second hard drive.  That way, even if the registry got fried, I might be able to retrieve the data.  I might even be able to repair the registry and somehow get windows to boot up again.  First things first – how to access the old virtual disk drive?

Using the new Fusion beta 2.0 interface was a snap.  They have a feature called “Easy Install” that automates the entire installation and then installs the VMWare Tools package for you.  I decided to go with Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition with SP2 – the same as the one I was running before.  (I’ve tried various flavors of Windows Server 2008 as well as the 64bit versions, but I don’t really see that much of an improvement especially since I’m using it mostly as a workstation for SharePoint development.).  I had forgotten how fast this machine is.  I allocated 3GB to the VM and configured it for 4 virtual CPUs.  Even though it says “Setup will complete in approximately 37 minutes”, the whole thing was done in less than 10 minutes on the Mac Pro.

Once I had the OS installed, I couldn’t wait to attach the old drive and start poking around.  So I opened the VM settings page and added a second hard disk, making a copy of the existing virtual disk from the other system.  Then I held my breath, crossed my fingers and stood by the window a-wishin’  for a miracle…

I couldn’t believe how long it took to boot up – but boot up it did!  Then I opened Windows Explorer and navigated to the My Computer node.  Low and behold, there were recognizable files!  Sadly, the “My Documents” folder was completely empty, so most of my documents were off to emerald city.  Not that I even remember what was there exactly.  But I know there was some good stuff in there.  Oh well.  Don’t get me wrong.  I’ll take what I can get.  And you can best believe this was an important wake up call for me.

Here’s the deal:

1. If you’re using VMWare Fusion – get the 2.0 beta NOW.
2. Turn on AutoProtect to do periodic snapshots.  After this experience, I have mine set to take a new snapshot every hour and to keep 10 copies for safe keeping.  You can set it for every day, hour or half-hour and it’s smart enough to keep a range of snapshots to provide different restore options. 
    
3. From the VMWare Fusion Preferences menu, under the ‘General’ tab in the ‘Performance’ section, select the “Optimize for virtual machine disk performance” option.  This turns off unbuffered i/o.  If you choose the other option (optimize for Mac OS application performance) it writes directly to the disk, using less memory, but you run the risk of hitting that nasty OS X bug.

Next, I’ll start poking around and see what files I can recover.  Then I’ll revert to the prior snapshot and see if the “My Documents” folder is still intact there.  I should be able to get back most of my older document files.  Anything else that was lost, well, what can I say?  Ah, the cost of complacency. 

JFH

Chalk it up to "bad karma".  Sometimes, we’re just destined to experience bad things.  Nasty, wicked, insanely cruel things. 

I was on a roll.  I had finally carved out some "extra time" and was well on my way to tying up all my loose ends.  You know - pet projects, writing, research.  Life was good.  Even kind of dreamy.

I'm not sure when it happened, exactly.  As I think back over the past 24 hours, there were definitely signs.  Maybe I'm not yet seasoned enough to recognize them since adopting my new Mac OS X dev platform.  But you'd think after 25+ years in this business, something would start to sink in.  Guess not.

I've been running VMWARE Fusion for the past 6 months or so, and I absolutely LOVE it.  I've got  Windows Server 2003 installed on a 40GB virtual disk.  LOTS of software tools installed.  I'm talking LOTS of tools and software.  MOSS, SQL Server, Office, Visual Studio, etc.  It's been working so well, I've fallen out of the habit of taking regular snapshots.  (Unlike VMWare Workstation 6, you can't take multiple snapshots in Fusion - only one snapshot that overwrites any previous ones.  This was a downer from the start - hopefully the folks at VMWare will change this in a future version.)  Still,  I really like this setup, because I can run iTunes, Safari and a host of other Mac apps while at the same time developing on a screaming WIN2003 virtual box.  It's really snappy and takes full advantage of the MONSTER hardware on my Mac Pro.

Anyway, I think it started with iTunes.  Every now an then, I would hear the tell-tale "swoosh" as some application was being terminated on the Mac side.  I thought it was some background process shutting down, but later, there was a popup that said another version of  iTunes was available and would I like to download it.  I said yes.  iTunes then proceeded to go into an infinite loop spinning indefinitely.  Tried to force quit - iTunes refused.  This was the first sign, but I was too busy to deal with it.  You see, I was in the middle of installing Visual Studio 2008 SP1.  This was one of those "loose ends" I'd been wanting to do since forever.

But there was a problem on the Windows side.  Seems the SP1 for Visual Studio was failing to install.  Everything else upgraded ok, including Office 2007 and all the other packages affected by the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1.  But for some reason the Visual Studio SP1 just kept failing.   I spent about a half day trying to figure this out.  Since I also had VS2005 on the same machine, I thought there might be some kind of strangeness in the registry.  Others had reported similar problems since the beta, so I uninstalled VS2005 completely and tried the SP1 upgrade again.  Still no dice.

I thought maybe I could just ignore it.  But when I tried to create a new project in Visual Studio - the "OK" button on the "New Project" dialog was disabled for all project types.  This meant I was effectively dead in the water.  I could continue to work on existing projects, but no new projects.  Not a good situation for a hard core developer like me.

Next, I tried a repair operation for VS2008.  Copied all new DLLs from the original DVD.  Everything worked fine.  No errors reported, but still no "OK" button.  Now I'm thinking complete uninstall/reinstall of Visual Studio.  But just to be on the "safe side" (ironic, eh?), I decide to shut down the VM and reboot just in case the windows installer had issues that needed to be cleaned up.  No problem.  Shut down the guest OS.  Shut down VMWare. 

Since I was having problems with iTunes, I figure now is probably a good time to reboot the physical machine as well.  This is where things start to get a little "hinky".  Seems iTunes is still refusing to shut down.  Can't restart the machine.  After a few minutes, the Apple Finder then crashes and burns.  Kind of like when Windows Explorer goes away and restarts.  Only, it doesn't restart.  Just the dock remains visible on the screen.  None of the reset keys work.  What to do?  What would you do?  Hardware reset, right? Wrong.  Not sure what else could have been done, though.

[ At this point, the stage is all set for a major catastrophe of some sort.  iTunes is having problems, likely with the physical disk.  Visual Studio is having problems, likely with the registry.  Fusion doesn't appear to be having problems, but since it is running while iTunes is choking, perhaps things are not all hunky-dory.  Finder has gone away - perhaps something still in memory that really needs to be flushed from the cache?  Who knows?  Definitely not me.  Certainly not now. ]

I press and hold the power button until the machine starts up again.  Great.  Startup iTunes - no problem.  Delicious sounds emanating from the speakers.  Startup VMWare Fusion.  Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition.  Windows logo appears on the screen.  I'm listening to Luther Vandross singing "Going in Circles" waiting for Windows to boot, and then WHAM!  Blue screen.  "Stop: C0000218 {Registry File Failure} The registry cannot load the hive (file): \SystemRoot\System32\Config\SOFTWARE or its log or alternate."

At first, I'm not sure what this means.  My mind starts racing.  I reset the VM and try it again.  WHAM!  BSOD!  I reset again and try to boot into safe mode using F8.   Windows seems to ignore the F8.  I check the system settings to make sure function keys are getting to the guest OS.  I reset again and again, trying desperately to boot into safe mode - no dice. 

[ Seems my hardware is TOO FAST!  Fusion doesn't have time to process the function keys in the instant between starting the VM and starting Windows.  (This is an area where the VMWare guys could help by perhaps including a "start Windows in safe mode" menu command.) ] 

Everything I find on Google says "reboot into safe mode".  But I can't get into safe mode at all.  Damn! 

Now I'm in full panic mode.  What was I working on?  How long since my last snapshot?  What am I going to lose if I revert to the last snapshot?  Will I be able to recover anything?  Can I access the hard drive even if the OS fails to boot?  What is the recovery process for a failed virtual drive?  Is John really up the creek this time without a paddle?  Find out next time on "Crash and Burn, Part Two – Wake Up Call".

Seriously, though.  This will definitely be a learning process, to say the least.  I'll post a follow up as soon as I can, but right now I have to go for a walk on the beach and settle down a bit.  Maybe I'll do some yoga later and then catch a movie or something.  I'm not kidding.   This is not looking good.

JFH