I am doing some work on my Hyper-V lab machine at home that requires a lot of VM’s and a lot of disk space. My eSATA disk just does not have the space so I had to do the unthinkable: use a 1TB USB 2.0 drive that I had sitting spare to store some VM’s (please do not ever do this in production). It will be slow but I can live with that for some lab stuff.
I attached the drive, cleared off a few bits and pieces, and used VMM Quick Storage Migration to move a bunch of VM’s over. I deployed a new VM and started working on it. It blue screened soon after boot up. Strange! I haven’t seen that before. I worked on it again and *bang* it was gone again.
My first suspect was W 2008 R2 SP1 beta, but I soon had a clue that it wasn’t at fault. In event viewer, under Hyper-V-VMMSAdmin I saw a bunch of errors telling me that Hyper-V could access various folders, including snapshots (I know I tell you not to use them in production but I use them in a lab) and data folders. The alerts associated with my new VM cooincided with the crash.
I appeared to have a permissions issue. I didn’t have time to figure out exactly what was at fault. Instead I moved the VMs, formatted the volume, and moved the VMs back again. Everything is working perfectly.
I reckon the info on this post has the answer.