Blue screen of death with Gentoo in VPC

KDawg44

Hi,

I randomly get a blue screen of death in VPC. I have windows XP SP2 on my work laptop and am running VPC 5.3.582.27. I installed Gentoo successfully. I have a gig of RAM in the laptop and at first I allocated 256MB to Gentoo in the VM. After the install, i got a blue screen of death on reboot. I could not see the error message it reported because the laptop rebooted too fast. I tried again and got another blue. Tried again and it ran for a while, another blue. I lowered the RAM allocated to 128 MB, it ran for a couple hours, then BAM another blue. These occur at random times with nothing I can see the same (sometimes at boot, sometimes just when I am doing other things, the last time when I logged into after startup).

Has anyone used Gentoo in VPC? Have you had any problems? I know that asking if anyone has had any problems with something Microsoft is like asking if the Detoit Lions lost last weekend, but I really would like to be able to run Gentoo on my work PC if I can.

Thanks.
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K-Dawg #44
I.T. Director
CCNA, ISA, MCSA, MCP, MCDST Certified

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." -- Aristotle

"Failure is not an option. It comes bundled with Windows."
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davidgurvich · Veteran Joined: 23 Apr 2004 Posts: 1063

If VPC stands for virtual pc, I recommend you get the server from vmware. I've never had a problem using that on x86.

KDawg44 · Posted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 5:10 pm Post subject:

VPC does stand for Virtual PC, sorry for the confusion. Is VMWare free to download and use?

Thanks.
_________________
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K-Dawg #44
I.T. Director
CCNA, ISA, MCSA, MCP, MCDST Certified

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." -- Aristotle

"Failure is not an option. It comes bundled with Windows."
--

Fedcer · n00b Joined: 27 Nov 2006 Posts: 24

timeBandit · Posted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 6:26 pm Post subject:

I'd advise running memtest86+ (get it here) to rule out any potential hardware problem. Observing different results when you changed the memory allocated to the VM suggests at least the possibility of bad memory.
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KDawg44 · Posted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 6:36 pm Post subject:

Thank you. I am looking into this. I have heard VMWare is very good (and seen experience required for many job postings). How is it different the VPC? Can I run a full install inside a virtual machine?

Thanks.
_________________
--
K-Dawg #44
I.T. Director
CCNA, ISA, MCSA, MCP, MCDST Certified

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." -- Aristotle

"Failure is not an option. It comes bundled with Windows."
--

KDawg44 · Posted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 6:59 pm Post subject:

Only the server version is free. How will this affect what I am trying to do? (which is simply to install Gentoo and run it for myself as a workstation and still use my windows when needed for my job).

THanks.
_________________
--
K-Dawg #44
I.T. Director
CCNA, ISA, MCSA, MCP, MCDST Certified

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." -- Aristotle

"Failure is not an option. It comes bundled with Windows."
--

timeBandit · Posted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 7:33 pm Post subject:

KDawg44 · Posted: Sat Dec 09, 2006 1:12 am Post subject:

VMWare server is working great so far! No blue screens of death! I have FreeBSD running in there and am now installing Gentoo.
_________________
--
K-Dawg #44
I.T. Director
CCNA, ISA, MCSA, MCP, MCDST Certified

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." -- Aristotle

"Failure is not an option. It comes bundled with Windows."
--