I was booting a new VMWare Virtual Machine with Windows PE through Altiris for initial deployment but Windows PE halted with a BSOD:

0x0000005D means UNSUPPORTED_PROCESSOR (defined in bugcodes.h) so I expected there was a x86 vs x64 problem.

The VM was configured for a 32 bit OS:

The Altiris Job was configured to use Auto Select:

But instead of the x86 version of Windows PE, Altiris attempts to boot the x64 version and this explains the BSOD: VMWare prevents the CPU from going to x64 mode and thus Windows has no choice but to halt.

Workaround is to change the Automation pre-boot environment in Altiris to x86:

Note that it’s no problem to deploy an x64 OS using the x86 version of Windows PE so I don’t see any real problems with this workaround.

If you read one of VMWare’s Best Practices Guides (in my case this one) then you may have read that it’s important to align guest partitions.

We can do this (for Windows OS) using the DiskPart tool that comes with the OS since Windows 2003 SP1 (there is a hotfix for earlier versions).

On Windows 2008, and higher, all partitions are automatically aligned to a 1 MB boundary.

But how to do this for the OS disk on Server 2003?

My first thought was to open a command prompt during setup, right before creating the partitions and then use diskpart.

However the OS partition is created during the Text portion of the install process and even though we can get a cmd prompt using SHIFT-F10 we get the recovery console (which has a builtin diskpart but cannot align).

So I used a Windows PE bootdisk. Any version with Diskpart should do but I used a bootdisk from Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery that I’ve customized to my own needs.

If you boot the original Symantec disk you can open a command prompt by accessing a hidden feature: move the mouse above the “S” from Symantec until you get a Hand icon and press the left mouse button:

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I wanted to boot a Virtual Machine from an USB Stick but even though you can Connect USB devices to VMWare you cannot boot from it.

It can be done however using a boot manager that is able to perform a boot from USB media. I used Plop Boot Manager.

Download one of the stable releases (I used 5.0.11-2) and extract plpbt.img from the archive and mount this (don’t forget to select the Connect at power on option) and when booting press Esc for the Boot Menu.

This would be a good time to Connect the USB device to the Virtual Machine, right click the USB device in the bottom bar:

And select the Connect option:

Click OK on the warning message:

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