buzzy | Win2K8R2: Hyper-V

A cool and cloudy day offered me the opportunity to do some more experimentation with my test Windows Server 2008 R2 installation. I decided I'd give Hyper-V a try. Installing it was smooth, though it did require three restarts before it was installed. I created my first machine, but then I couldn't start it. I kept getting some error (Event IDs 3040 and 3112) about the hypervisor not running, which then provides me with three things to check. The first thing is to verify that the computer can handle Hyper-V. I figured that if I could install it, it should work. The second thing it said is to make sure that the BIOS settings are correct. There are tools to check your settings: AMD offers one for their processors, but the download page always came up blank for me regardless of what browser I use. (Link provided in case they fix it after I post this.) If you can't get it, I found a copy on Major Geeks or you could Google it to find other download sources. Microsoft says to use the Processor Identification Utility for Intel processors. Since this machine is running an AMD processor, I used the AMD utility, which said everything should work. The third thing was to check the Boot Configuration Data store. I had a hard time looking for information on this. (I saw these two articles, but neither were helpful for the problem I was having: one two. Maybe it's because they apply to Windows Server 2008 without the R2. One of those articles linked to a video, but I'm not going to install Silverlight just to watch one video.) I eventually found that you can show the hypervisor settings by running bcdedit /hypervisorsettings. The output from that on my machine is:

hypervisordebugtype: Serial
hypervisordebugport: 1
hypervisorbaudrate: 115200

Well, I know this computer doesn't have any serial ports. The device manager shows no COM or LPT ports. Could that be the reason for the problems? The only reason it seems to need a serial port is for debugging. As it turns out, running bcdedit /set hypervisordebug Off and restarting did the trick. Too bad I can't get the OS installation in my first virtual machine to work. I'll work on troubleshooting that later, since it's not cloudy anymore. This entry is marked public just in case it helps someone.