Can’t Start Hyper-V VMs with Event ID 12140, 12010 and 12030

Had a few Hyper-V host systems today that after rebooting failed to restart the VMs that were set to auto-restart. No updates had been installed – the reboots were due to power environment changes.

Attempting to restart them from Hyper-V Manager simply resulted in the VM status quickly changing from Off to Starting then back to Off.

Digging though the Event Logs (Applications and Service Logs | Microsoft | Windows | Hyper-V-Worker | Admin) resulted in this:

Log Name:      Microsoft-Windows-Hyper-V-Worker-Admin
Source:        Microsoft-Windows-Hyper-V-Worker
Date:          4/02/2013 1:42:57 PM
Event ID:      12140
Description:
'hyper-vm1': Failed to open attachment 'E:\hyper-v\VHDs\hyper-vm1.vhd'. Error: 'A device attached to the system is not functioning.' (0x8007001F). (Virtual machine ID 9F3157AA-4875-45C5-BAE4-3D7D5C432B8A)

Log Name:      Microsoft-Windows-Hyper-V-Worker-Admin
Source:        Microsoft-Windows-Hyper-V-Worker
Date:          4/02/2013 1:42:57 PM
Event ID:      12010
Description:
'hyper-vm1' Microsoft Emulated IDE Controller (Instance ID {83F8638B-8DCA-4152-9EDA-2CA8B33039B4}): Failed to Power on with Error 'A device attached to the system is not functioning.' (0x8007001F). (Virtual machine ID 9F3157AA-4875-45C5-BAE4-3D7D5C432B8A)

Log Name:      Microsoft-Windows-Hyper-V-Worker-Admin
Source:        Microsoft-Windows-Hyper-V-Worker
Date:          4/02/2013 1:42:57 PM
Event ID:      12030
Description:
'hyper-vm1' failed to start. (Virtual machine ID 9F3157AA-4875-45C5-BAE4-3D7D5C432B8A)

And this one from Hyper-V-VMMS/Admin (Applications and Service Logs | Microsoft | Windows | Hyper-V-VMMS | Admin):

Log Name:      Microsoft-Windows-Hyper-V-VMMS-Admin
Source:        Microsoft-Windows-Hyper-V-VMMS
Date:          4/02/2013 1:37:05 PM
Event ID:      14098
Description:
'Storage Virtualization Service Provider' driver required by the Virtual Machine Management service is not installed or is disabled. Check your settings or try reinstalling the Hyper-V role.

It was this second one that helped me track down the problem. I subsequently found Microsoft Knowledgebase Article 2013544 which listed a similar scenario and recommended changing the FSDepends driver from Manual start to Boot start as follows:

• Start Registry Editor
• Navigate to the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\FsDepends
• Under the FsDepends key, change REG_DWORD value “Start” from 3 to 0
• Restart the server

The reason is supposedly due to a timing issue between FSDepends.sys (nested volume dependency management driver) and VHDMP.sys (VHD parser and dependency property provider driver), typically triggered by third party backup programs that load tape drivers. This wasn’t the case in my situation, but changing FsDepends from Manual start to Boot start ended up resolving my VM startup problem.