PSOD - Purple Screen of Death
July 8, 2008Just incase you ever wondered what it looks like here is a screendump..
this is the VMWare equivalent of Microsoft’s BSOD (Blue Screen of Death)
I got this whilst running ESX 3.5 under VMWare Workstation 6.5 build 99530, it happened because I was trying to boot my ESX installation from a SCSI hard disk - which it didn’t like - I assume because of driver support, swapped for an IDE one and it worked fine…
update - actually the VM had 384Mb of RAM allocated and that’s what actually stopped it from booting.. upped to 1024Mb and it runs fine.
Its the first time I’ve seen one - all the production ESX boxes I’ve worked with have always been rock-solid (touch wood)
I’m preparing a blog post about unattended installations of ESX when I hit this, in case you were wondering.
Does anyone know how to force a PSOD? I want to do some testing and would like to be able to cause a PSOD on my ESX host.