Recently two customers contacted me about virtual machines blue screening upon boot after they upgraded their virtual hardware from version 4 to 7. Both had the same 07b blue screen which means no driver for the disk controller could be found.
The steps for updating the virtual hardware is: 1. install latest vmware tools 2. shut down the vm and select “upgrade virtual hardware”
The problem here was that both customers allready had installed the latest vmware tools, but the machine still bluescreened on boot.
The fix to get your machine back online:
1. Remove the disks from the virtual machines you just upgraded.
2. Create a new virtual machine (version 4) and attach the original disks. Attach the disk in the right order and use
the same disk controller used for the machine before the upgrade.
This should get your machine back online. Then try to reinstall vmware tools in the machine and upgrade the driver for the disk controller. Before doing the next virtual hardware upgrade take a snapshot of the machine, so you can easily revert if it blue screens again.