Installation problems on Virtual Machine

Hi,

I am trying to install Office 2013 (via an Office 365 subscription so it's the Click To Run version) on a freshly installed Windows 8.1 virtual machine (QEMU-KVM-libvirt under Linux). Currently I get the error message "Microsoft Word has stopped" in the final stages of installation, and I get the same error after the splash screen when I try to run the applications later. The same message

I've tried all of the commonly suggested solutions;

  • reinstalling/repairing
  • disabling all the Add-Ons in safe mode
  • disabling hardware acceleration
  • updating video drivers (Red Hat QXL)
  • run the OffCAT checker - no serious issues are indicated

Application Error shows nothing much - error code 0xc0000005, but the failing module is blank.

The VM uses a raw disk image file, kept in a partition on my SSD. I have another VM which uses a physical disk - this is on a HDD which is pretty slow, hence trying to migrate to SSD.

I've almost run out of ideas - the one thing I can think of to try is to make a new VM using a single partition on the SSD (so I'd have to use legacy boot, I think).

Thanks,

Mark


August 22nd, 2015 10:09am

Hi George,

Thanks for your reply. I don't appear to have DisplayLink Drivers installed. I did try installing them but that crashed the Windows Boot Loader, so I rolled back the changes.

I've also uninstalled my software/firewall completely and tried a reinstall of Office 365. Still the same problem - as soon as the "Welcome" splash screen appears, I get a "stopped working" error.

Any other ideas?

Mark

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August 24th, 2015 10:45am

I have now reinstalled Windows on a new VM and am successfully running Office 365.

I can't be 100% sure what made the difference as a number of things are different, but if anyone is having the same problem I would recommend experimenting with the Cache setting on your virtual disk. I finally noticed that on the working VM this was set to "None" whereas the one with all the problems was set to "Default".

If you're using libvirt, the xml looks like this;

  <disk type='block' device='disk'>
    <driver name='qemu' type='raw' cache='none'/>
      ...
  </disk>
 
In virt-manager, look at the properties of your virtual disk, expand Advanced Properties, and within this expand Performance Options. Here you can set "Cache mode" to "None".

Mark
August 24th, 2015 8:50pm

Hi,

Thanks for sharing your experience here. It'll be benefited to our communicator.

Have a good time.

Regards,

George Zhao
TechNet Community Support

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August 24th, 2015 9:21pm

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