The VMware splash screen appeared. The swirling dots. Five seconds. Ten seconds.
She opened the VM settings. SCSI Controller 0: LSI Logic SAS. That was normal. But then she remembered: the latest Windows 10 cumulative update sometimes overwrites the VMware Tools driver for the Paravirtual SCSI (PVSCSI) controller. Her VM wasn’t even on PVSCSI—it was on LSI Logic SAS. So why the crash? vmware windows 10 inaccessible boot device
“Oh no,” she muttered. “Not the payroll box.” The VMware splash screen appeared
Then—the login screen. Glorious, blue, unbroken. Ten seconds
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:
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.”
That was the key. Windows 10 had loaded its update, rebooted, and lost its mind—or more precisely, lost its storage driver. A classic race condition: Windows tried to load the disk driver milliseconds after it had already given up on the boot volume.