Hyper-V: 'machine' could not initialize

Question

I looked for a lot of articles regarding my problem, but none of them seem to explain this particular behavior. I have a Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 installed as a host OS and a Hyper-V role enabled. I have 4 virtual machines, which were working like a charm until yesterday. The core environment didn't change, everything was working well, but at one moment all VMs stop working. When I try to start any of them (or new one created) it says: 'machine' could not initialize. Where the 'machine' is a VM name.

NOTE: they were working on this host without any issues. They were working, they were started. The machine was not rebooted and nothing was installed there. They just stopped working at one moment.

I checked BIOS - the Intel Hardware Virtualization is enabled. The test tool shows that the Hardware D.E.P is enabled.

UPDATE: The machine was rebooted after BSOD.

Answer 1

I had the exact same error (except for the Machine ID of course), and this helped me out: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2517374

It seems to relate to Sandy Bridge CPUs...

Hope it will work for you too.

BR Dave

Answer 2

I experienced the same thing after the host blue screened. Could not start any of the machines that had been running just fine before. Just got the error message "'machine' could not initialize"

I restarted the host machine one more time, and now the machines start just fine.

Maybe this can help others, before resorting to other solutions.