Wednesday, January 27, 2021

STOP 0x74 on Windows Virtual Machines

 So I've been running into this a fair bit of late.

After chasing down the rabbit hole on the first one, worrying about virtual disk corruption, malware, legacy drivers (it was a P2V image), underlying host physical memory problems, the resolution was surprisingly simple - increase the virtual machine startup memory by 1GB.

Turns out the boot-time drivers had increased in number/size (looking at you anti-malware drivers) and the dynamic memory boot-time driver doesn't kick in early enough to allow the SYSTEM registry hive to be loaded properly.

So if you run across this in a virtual setting check the VM's startup memory size and bump it up.

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