She chose the latter.
She killed the loop and powered off the VM. Her mind raced through the possible causes. She hadn’t changed any boot order settings. No new disks. Just a standard Windows Update. But this error— inaccessible boot device —meant one thing in VMware: the virtual hard disk controller had changed, or the driver for it had vanished into the digital abyss.
Then, like a bad dream wrapped in a QR code, the screen flipped to blue: Your PC ran into a problem and needs to restart. We’ll restart for you. The VM restarted. Same blue screen. Loop. Loop. Loop.
She pulled the VM’s logs from /var/log/vmkernel.log on the ESXi host. Buried in the red text: “Device ‘scsi0:0’ is not ready. Access to device failed.” vmware windows 10 inaccessible boot device
“Oh no,” she muttered. “Not the payroll box.”
She had two choices. Rebuild from backup (three hours of restore time, plus a crying VP of Finance on Monday morning) or fix the driver offline.
She exhaled, leaned back, and typed a single entry into the change log: “VM restored. Root cause: Windows Update nuked storage driver. Note to self: convert VM to PVSCSI and inject drivers before next Patch Tuesday.” She chose the latter
Sarah, a senior systems administrator, is three hours into a quiet Sunday night shift. She’s patching a legacy Windows 10 VM—a critical virtual machine that runs the payroll database for a 500-person firm. The host is VMware ESXi 7.0. She clicks “Reboot Guest.” Thirty seconds later, her screen turns a familiar, dreaded shade of blue. The progress bar on the VMware console froze at 47%.
The VMware splash screen appeared. The swirling dots. Five seconds. Ten seconds.
drvload E:\win10\amd64\vmwscsi.inf A pause. A blink of the cursor. She hadn’t changed any boot order settings
The Blue Screen Threshold
“The virtual disk is fine,” she said, checking the datastore. “So the guest can’t see the boot disk.”
Sarah leaned forward, her coffee forgotten. “Come on, come on…” she whispered, tapping the spacebar. Nothing.
Sarah attached the Windows 10 ISO to the VM’s virtual CD-ROM. She booted into the recovery environment— Repair your computer > Troubleshoot > Command Prompt . Then she ran the cavalry: