If you have installed the Windows Server 2012 RC in VMWare Workstation 8, you may encounter a blinking blue/black screen, right after installation. In addition, your screen may hang on a black screen, or boot to Safe Mode after several minutes.
There are several possible fixes for this problem, so I thought it would be handy to sum them up, so you don’t have to search for them 🙂
Best is to apply one solution a time and check whether it helped you out
- Enable (or disable!) “Accelerate 3D Graphics”. You can find this option in the Settings screen of the Windows 2012 Virtual Machine.
There’s no specific prove that you should enable or disable 3D Graphics, so you should just toggle and try :) - Increase the Memory to at least 2 GB. Some people noticed problems when the virtual memory assigned was 1 GB or less. In addition, assigning 512 MB to a Windows server is not a best practice 🙂
- Add the following lines to your VMX-file. You can find the VMX file at the location where your VM harddisk is also located”:
hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = FALSE
mce.enable = "TRUE"
vmGenCounter.enable = FALSE - In the New Virtual Machine wizard (so before the actual installation of Windows 2012), choose Windows 7 x64 as Windows Version. (By default, it you’ve selected the ISO in the previous screen, VMWare will select Windows 2008 R2 as the Windows Version)
I hope I’ve helped you out with this post…
Thanks, enabling 3D graphics in VMware Fusion 4 worked for me!
Enabling 3D graphics worked for me in VMware Workstation 8. I selected Windows Server 2008 R2 as the OS, and maybe this isn’t selected by default for the server OS (I had no problems with Windows 8 and I used Windows 7 x64 which seems to have 3D graphics enabled by default)
Fixed my problem (turning 3D accel. on) thanks a bunch!