Can't run Hyper-V, but all hardware indicate that it's good to go

Question

I'm trying to get my Hyper-V to work on my home computer. As I see it, all my hardware supports Virtualization and the software SecurAble is saying Good to go. Yes in Hardware D.E.P. and Yes to Hardware Virtualization.

My Motherboard is GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3 and my CPU is Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40GHz (8 CPUs), ~3.7GHz. BIOS is updated and factory defaults after update. Virtualization is enabled in the BIOS too.

I found this post about my motherboard: Does VT-d need hardware support (besides the CPU)? And as I read it, I can run Hyper-V. But when I start my virtual machine I get the message:

Virtual Machine 'Name os Hyper-V machine' could not be started because the hypervisor is not running.

The message indicates that I haven't enabled all settings for virtualization, but I can't see what that is now, and therefor asking for help here :-)

Answer 1

After a long time looking at this issue, and not being able to find a solution for it, I found a solution for the issue and it solved my problem.

Source for solution: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2010/01/19/hyper-v-virtual-machines-do-not-start-after-using-startup-repair.aspx

Title: Hyper-V virtual machines do not start after using Startup Repair

Over the weekend, I attempted to reconfigure some of the drives in my Hyper-V server at home. Note that I said attempted. I ran into hardware issues and ended up having to revert back to my old configuration - but somehow in all of this – I broke my system disk.

Specifically it would not boot any more.

This did not phase me because I knew that the excellent startup repair tool in Windows would soon have me up and running – which it did.

But I was surprised to find that when my system did finally boot – none of my virtual machines started up. When I tried to start the virtual machines manually, I was informed that the hypervisor was not running.

After scratching my head for a moment, I realized what had happened. Startup repair had rebuilt my boot configuration data store to get my system up and running. But it did not know that Hyper-V needs to have some specific settings enabled in the boot configuration data store in order to start the hypervisor.

I quickly opened an administrative command prompt and ran the following command:

bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype auto

After that I rebooted the system and successfully started my virtual machines.

Cheers, Ben

The solution was this command line below and a computer restart:

Answer 2

After a lot of searching, I found out that I did not had a hypervisor component installed.

After checking it and rebooting virtual machine works without problems!

Answer 3

There are two settings for ensure that Hyper-V runs with Intel chips:

1. Intel VT-d is disabled
2. "Trusted Execution" is disabled or "Execute Disable" is enabled

The second one is tricky because it's confusing to EVERYONE. It seems to be different on every motherboard, and the double-negative of "enable the disable" doesn't help at all!

Once these are set properly, you need to fully power down the machine to ensure that the new settings take effect. New "quick reboot" features do not necessarily mean that Windows 8 reboots from a fully powered-down state which is necessary for this change.

The same link above says that the next step is to check your Boot Configuration Data store to ensure that Hyper-V is actually set to start when the OS starts, but most problems are getting the BIOS/UEFI settings right.

The best resource I've found is this 5-minute video in which he walks you through all the detail. (I would type it all out, but that would be plagiarizing)

In your particular situation, these would be my troubleshooting steps:

1. Fully power down the PC, start the PC and see if I can start the VM based on my previous changes
2. If that fails, go to the BIOS/UEFI and change the Trusted Execution/Execute Disable option from whatever it is to the other option (no to yes, yes to no), wait for the machine to boot, then repeat step 1
3. Check the BCD (which is beyond my knowledge, but can be researched)