Monday, March 24, 2008 4:29 PM
philipnet
VMWare BSODs: Hard drive related
I’ve been able to isolate my VMWare BSODs to hard drive issues.
No hard drive has failed – yet, but my first clue was when the Windows crash reports stopped saying “Unknown error” and started saying “Hard drive problem – probably nothing to worry about” 
.
That “nothing to worry about” is actually:
ATA Error Count: 38
Which I found out by logging on to the VMWare host and issuing the commands:
smartctl --all /dev/sda
smartctl --all /dev/sdb
as the VMWare installation is RAID 1-ed across both drives
As there isn’t anything wrong with sdb I can safely switch sda for a new hard drive and rebuild the RAID, but that means a few days of little activity on the system.