BSOD after Importing a RHEV 2.2 virtual machine to RHEV 3 due to VirtIO driver viostor.sys

Solution Verified - Updated -

Issue

  • A virtual machine that has older VirtIO storage drivers will show a Blue Screen (BSOD) after attempting to run it using a newer version of qemu-kvm which is incompatible with the older drivers.

  • The BSOD will include messages about DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL and viostor.sys as shown by the image in the 'Diagnostic Steps' section below.

  • With Windows 2008 R2, the machine will BSOD then reboot and prompt to enter recovery mode. Others versions may enter a BSOD reboot loop, and might require a Windows Recovery Disk to repair.

Environment

  • Situations in which the drivers may be incompatible include:

    • Importing a Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2 virtual machine to a RHEV 3 environment.
    • Running a backup of a VM with virt-manager / qemu-kvm, where the old guest tools had been installed for use on an older version of RHEL.
  • The steps included in this article are for recovery of a virtual machine that is running Windows 2008 R2 on either Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3 or a newer plain qemu-kvm/libvirt setup. They may also apply to other versions of Windows, though a Windows Recovery Disk may be needed to enter recovery mode in order to replace the driver.

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