Resizing a virtual disk containing a swap file results in the blue screen error: 0x0000007A KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

After increasing the size of the VMDK for a Windows virtual machine that contains the swap file, you may experience these symptoms:

• Rescanning in Disk Management causes the virtual machine to fail
• You see this blue screen error:

STOP 0x0000007A KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR

Environment

VMware ESX 4.1.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.0
VMware ESXi 4.1.x Embedded
VMware ESXi 4.1.x Installable

Resolution

This issue occurs when the disk has been increased with the virtual machine still running. Disk Management has to disconnect from the disk and re-connect due to the parameters of the disk being changed, which causes the page file to disconnect and prevents kernel data located in the page file from loading into memory.

Microsoft recommends moving the page file to another disk before attempting to resize the disk. For more information, see the Microsoft Knowledge Base article 325590.

To workaround this issue:

1. Add a new virtual disk to the virtual machine.
2. Rescan in Disk Management.(In Windows you can access it though Start --> Run --> diskmgmt.msc)
3. Create a new NTFS volume on the new disk.
4. Move the swap file to the new volume.
5. Adjust the swap file size as required.
6. Remove the old swap file.
7. Remove the virtual disk from the virtual machine and rescan in Disk Management.
   
   Note: With some Windows operating systems, you may have to reboot the virtual machine to make changes to the swap file configuration.