Win2008r2 Update On CentOS 6 Host Made System Unbootable

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Hi, today we ran into a strange problem: When performing a regular Windows
2008r2 update apparently among other things the following was installed:
“SUSE – Storage Controller – SUSE Block Driver for Windows”

Previously the disk drive was using the Red Hat virtio drivers which worked just fine but after the reboot after the update I just get a blue screen indicating that Windows cannot find a boot device.

Does anyone understand what is going on here? Why is the windows update installing a Suse driver that overrides the Red Hat driver even though it is apparently incompatible with the system?

Regards,
Dennis

8 thoughts on - Win2008r2 Update On CentOS 6 Host Made System Unbootable

  • I can’t roll back the driver for that device because I can’t boot the system. The only way I can boot into the system is by changing the disk type to IDE but then I cannot roll back the driver because the entire device changed. As far as I can tell the Suse version of the virtio block driver is incompatible with the incompatible with the system but right now I see no way to tell windows “Uninstall the driver completely for the entire system” so that on the next boot it would fall back to the old virtio driver from Red Hat. I tried installing the current stable drivers from this URL:
    https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Windows_Virtio_Drivers

    But Windows refuses and says the driver is already up-to-date.

    What worries me is that I want to update other win2008r2 guests as well but now fear that they will all be rendered unbootable by such an update.

    Regards,
    Dennis

  • This is pretty epic if true. I’m installing some Fail 2008r2 now to check.

    Is your hypervisor running CentOS 6 or 7?

  • Op 09-12-15 om 01:00 schreef Dennis Jacobfeuerborn:

    Which virtualization are you using? KVM?

    How did you get that update offered?

    I can’t reproduce it, but then my servers are on a patch management software. And I can’t check on WU because I don’t want to install the new update client.

    Anyway, I would uncheck that patch when updating the other guests if I were you. And work on a copy / snapshot.

    Patrick

  • Yes, this is a CentOS 6 Host using regular libvirt based virtualization. The Suse driver is apparently an optional update that gets delivered using the regular Microsoft update mechanism. It’s hard to believe that they didn’t catch a completely broken driver during QA so my hypothesis is that maybe the new Virtio driver is incompatible only with the older Kernel of CentOS 6 and that this wasn’t properly tested. To verify this one could check if the same thing happens on a CentOS 7 Host but at the moment I’m to busy the check this.

    Regards,
    Dennis

  • Op 09-12-15 om 14:23 schreef Dennis Jacobfeuerborn:

    Regrettably Microsoft has picked up the habbit of giving out buggy patches. Sysadmins are becoming betatesters.

    I wish I could test it but haven’t got no C7 host yet.

    Hope you didn’t got bitten too hard and thanks for the heads -up. Patrick

  • Well to be fair to Microsoft, the only reason SuSE driver would even load on RHEL is if the virtio devices running on SuSE look to Windows sufficiently like the virtio devices running on RHEL. It’s not the normal thing to have two completely different vendors writing drivers for nearly identical (yet incompatible) hardware, so it’s not terribly surprising that they didn’t start out with checks for this kind of thing.

    -George