Tribal Chicken

Security. Malware Research. Digital Forensics.

XenServer: Win Server 2012 not booting

Windows guest not booting from the installation CD? Server 2012 gave me a message along the lines of “Your PC needs to restart”.

The VM needs the NX bit set at the VM level as well (But first please make sure you actually have NX or equivalent enabled in BIOS!).

# xe vm-list params=platform uuid=<uuid-of-vm>

Will give you something along the lines of:

platform (MRW)    : timeoffset: 0; nx: false; acpi: 1; apic: true; pae: true; viridian: true

Notice the “nx: false”? We want that to be “nx: true”:

# xe vm-param-set platform:nx=true uuid=<uuid-of-vm>

If you run the “vm-list params” again you should notice that it now says “nx: true”. Boot your windows VM and enjoy!