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Sysprep causing BSOD on Windows 2008 R2 Clone

Posted on 24 May 2012

I recently ran across an issue with cloning a powered on Windows 2008 R2 SQL server.  After cloning the VM and successfully booting and rebooting the box several times, I ran sysprep.  Shortly after running the sysprep command the VM rebooted and came up with the error “autochk program not found” and then a short view of a BSOD and then a reboot.  Tried the clone again several times with no joy.

This thread on the vmware communities led to a couple solutions.  Either power off the VM prior to the clone or clear the nodefaultdriveletter bit on the C drive using diskpart.  Since I couldn’t easily take an outage and power down SQL I tried the second solution.  Worked like a charm. Seems this error may also affect template creation from powered on VMs as well according to the thread.

• Run diskpart on cloned server
• list volume
• select volume 1 (or whichever volume is the c: drive)
• attributes volume
• attributes volume clear nodefaultdriveletter
• reboot
• run sysprep normally

It has been reported that this issue may also affect Windows 7 clones and also template creation from Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 7.