Hacker's ramblings

Since most modern Intel CPUs have VT-x in them and Windows 8 Pro has Hyper-V in it, I had to make use of the combo on my old laptop. It has a i5 mobile CPU which makes it on the less powerful end of CPUs. But the simple existence of a possibility of running a Linux on top of a Windows laptop makes me want to try it.

I added the Hyper-V feature into my Windows. I started the Hyper-V Management Console, added a virtual network switch and created a new virtual machine. It booted into Linux installer and the entire Windows crashed with a blue-screen-of-death. WTF?!

After a number of attempts with tweaking the Hyper-V settings, no avail. Every attempt to actually do anything reasonable in the guest system yielded a BSOD. Couple more futile attempts on command-line indicated that it had to have something to do with networking.

Next day I managed to Google into one discussion thread on Microsoft's social forums. There another unfortunate user is experiencing the same symptoms than me. Unlike his Windows 7, on my Windows 8 BSOD there isn't much of a stack trace or any usable information. But I had to try something, so I took an Ethernet-cable and plugged it into my laptop and reconfigured the Hyper-V virtual switch not to use the Intel Centrino 6200 WLAN, but a 1 Gbit/s Realtek port. That did the trick! Apparently some network drivers are not Hyper-V compatible. I don't know how to tell the difference between functioning or not functioning driver, but it is there.

There seems to be some sort of issue with hard drive, but that's an another story ...