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Recently I needed to create a new VM, and this VM needed to start from ISO file. When I mounted an ISO file and tried to boot, I’ve seen the following error:

Synthetic SCSI Controller (Instance ID xxx): Failed to Power on with Error ‘The version does not support this version of the file format’

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  • Consider starting from IDE.
    – TomTom
    Aug 28, 2016 at 16:52

2 Answers 2

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Your ISO file is most probably blocked by Windows.

Start by right-clicking the file => Properties. Click Unblock => OK/Apply.

Try now, and if that doesn't work, create a copy of the ISO file and try again.

If that doesn't work, Try a different machine.

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The solution to this problem is very simple: just make a copy of the ISO file and use that instead!

The issue is that Hyper-V does not support booting from sparse ISO files. A file may be sparse if it was downloaded via BitTorrent or other parallel download managers. A regular Windows Explorer file copy will create a non-sparse copy, which Hyper-V supports.


To check whether or not a file is sparse, Right Click, select Properties, and look at the Details tab. If P is present under the Attributes, the file is sparse and will fail to boot:

Screenshot of Details tab with Attributes section highlighted

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    Thank You! I made copy and then file "Properties" -> "Unblock", and it worked! File wasn't "AP" but "AI", but ctrl+c, ctrl+v helped, Thank You!!
    – Gennady G
    Aug 16, 2018 at 9:35

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