Windows 10 VM Pausing Immediately

[MSOBadger]

Hello folks-

 

I am having an issue with my Windows 10 VM - it started continually pausing on me a few days ago.  After doing some researching here for others with a similar issue, it looks like the pausing happens when the drive is out of space.   That indeed looks like it was the cause of my original problem, as the 70GB vdisk containing my operating system was showing as fully allocated to 70GB. 

 

So I followed a tutorial I found and started by shutting down the VM and then upping the capacity of the vdisk in Unraid's dashboard to 200GB, which should give me plenty of space.   This part seems to have gone without a hitch.

 

I restarted the VM so that I could log into Windows and perform the second step of increasing the usable drive space within Windows itself.   However, here is where I'm running into an issue - I am unable to get to that step as after upping the 70GB capacity on the vdisk, and restarting the VM - the VM immediately flips into Paused status and I am unable to get into it.   I've tried quitting and restarting the Windows 10 VM numerous times, I've stopped and restarted the VM system, and I've also rebooted the Unraid server itself.  But still it auto-pauses immediately.  

 

I also noticed that the "allocated" space on the vdisk is no longer showing as 70GB, but rather only 15GB.

 

The vdisk is stored on an unassigned M.2 drive with plenty of unused space (it's a 512GB drive with only 90GB used).  The VM also has a second, larger, vdisk setup as an additional storage drive.  That is housed on a separate M.2 drive.  (I mentioning this for completeness, as I wouldn't imagine the second drive would have anything to do with this issue.)

 

Did I nuke my VM here?   Or does anyone have an idea as to how I can get back into it?

 

Thanks!

-Scott

[ghost82]

Hi, once the disk is full you can have issue in booting the vm, as you experienced.

When you increased the vdisk size you didn't allocate the space to windows, and so you should not have been able to login to windows to allocate the space, you only increased the unallocated space.

Create a new virtual machine with a gparted iso image and the windows vdisk, boot gparted and perform all the operations on the partition with gparted (increase the allocated space).

Or add to your existing windows vm the gparted live iso cd rom, boot to it and perform operations on the windows vdisk.

Always make backups before starting experimenting.

I suggest also to check if you enabled "discard" in your windows vm, so that the disk can be trimmed properly and not get full on the host side.

Edited October 23, 2021 by ghost82

[MSOBadger]

5 hours ago, ghost82 said:

Create a new virtual machine with a gparted iso image and the windows vdisk, boot gparted and perform all the operations on the partition with gparted (increase the allocated space).

Or add to your existing windows vm the gparted live iso cd rom, boot to it and perform operations on the windows vdisk.

 

Thanks for the quick reply @ghost82!   I downloaded a gparted ISO and attempted both of your suggestions above.  (It took a while to backup the 200GB vdisk image first before I dove in on your suggestions.)

 

I first tried setting up a new Win10 VM with the gparted ISO set as the OS Install ISO and the Windows vdisk from my original Win10 VM as the primary vdisk.   The VM started, but I've been unable to connect to it with VNC (I've tried both Unraid's built-in noVNC web client as well as a standalone RealVNC viewer on my PC.   I do see the VM's MAC address in my router log and it is pulling a valid IP address.

 

I then tried editing my original Win10 VM so that it's OS Install ISO was set to gparted (leaving all other settings untouched) and I was unable to access that via VNC either (same results as the above attempt).

 

Any thoughts?

[ghost82]

1 hour ago, MSOBadger said:

Any thoughts?

mmm no...and it's difficult to say what's happening...if you have no errors during the vm creation I would exclude errors in the template. I would check the network, how are you connecting to the vm? from localhost (same box), or from another device via lan?

If it's the second, remember that you need to connect vnc to the ip of the host and not to that of the vm.

Edited October 23, 2021 by ghost82

[MSOBadger]

44 minutes ago, ghost82 said:

If it's the second, remember that you need to connect vnc to the ip of the host and not to that of the vm.

 

This was my problem, lol.  I was pointing RealVNC to the VM's IP rather than the server host.   After pointing it to the server's IP I was able to remote in and run gparted and expand the primary Windows partition.  After that, I was able to boot into Windows again on the primary vdisk and the OS virtual disk now shows the full expanded size.   Thanks for the help there.

 

It looks like I'm not out of the woods yet though.  With the partition resized, I went back and fired up the original instance of the VM (i.e. the one that has the second vdisk setup (i.e. my data disk for this VM), and I ended up right back in the instant-pause cycle.   After some messing around, I discovered that the VM boots just fine with just the primary vdisk, but as soon as the second is added it pauses on boot.   

 

I made a copy of this vdisk2 file and tossed it on my Windows laptop and tried to mount the disk there and received a "the disk image file is corrupted" error.   I've never tried mounting a vdisk that Unraid created like this before... should that work if the vdisk is working properly (meaning this vdisk2 is actually corrupted)?   Or is it normal to be unable to mount a vdisk in Windows in this manner?

 

Assuming that the vdisk is actually corrupted... is there any way to restore the data?

[ghost82]

9 hours ago, MSOBadger said:

and tried to mount the disk there and received a "the disk image file is corrupted" error

I'm assuming your vdisk2 has only one partition, like ntfs or something else?

In unraid in the terminal what's the output of

fdisk -l /path/to/image/vdisk2.img

?

[MSOBadger]

2 hours ago, ghost82 said:

In unraid in the terminal what's the output of

fdisk -l /path/to/image/vdisk2.img

 

Here's the output - 

 

Quote

Disk [PATH]/vdisk2.img: 240 GiB, 257698037760 bytes, 503316480 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 5C3E4624-1E83-4A66-9DDD-E8FD56278AB0

Device                                                                    Start                End           Sectors       Size        Type
[PATH]/vdisk2.img1                                                       34            32767            32734        16M        Microsoft reserved
[PATH]/vdisk2.img2                                                32768     503312383     503279616     240G        Microsoft basic da

 

[ghost82]

5 minutes ago, MSOBadger said:

Here's the output

ok at least there are partitions on it.

Now we need to know what is the filesystem of the 240G partition, where the data should be.

You can use parted command:

parted /path/to/vdisk2.img print

 

Check the column "File system" for the 240G partition.

 

If it's ntfs, try to mount it:

create a directory for your mount point first (/mount/point/).

 

mount -t ntfs -o ro,offset=$((512*32768)) /path/to/vdisk2.img /mount/point/

 

Does it mount?

[MSOBadger]

THANK YOU @ghost82!!  That did the trick!  I was able to mount the image and get all the files backed up off of it.  You are a god-send!  

 

Now to get to work on setting things back up.   Thanks again!