She navigated to a USB drive she had pre-loaded (she wasn’t a rookie) with the VMware Tools floppy image—specifically the vmwscsi.inf driver for the LSI Logic SAS controller. Then, the magic incantation:
drvload E:\win10\amd64\vmwscsi.inf A pause. A blink of the cursor.
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.
The Blue Screen Threshold
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.
The VMware splash screen appeared. The swirling dots. Five seconds. Ten seconds.
