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How to verify if a cpu's hardware virtualization is working properly?

idata
Employee
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I recently bought an Alienware Aurora system that came with windows 7 ultimate 64-bit and an i7 980x Extreme. For the past few weeks, I had successfully installed mac os snow leopard under windows 7 with vmware workstation, had no problem surfing the net with safari or programming iphone apps with xcode. Then all these good things came to an abrupt end yesterday, when I was suddenly greeted with this message when trying to run the Mac OS virtual machine:

 

"A virtual cpu has entered the shutdown state. This would have caused a physical machine to restart......."

At first I thought some of the windows updates might've broken vmware workstation, but after 2 clean installs of win 7 and still getting the same error msg, this became less of a possibility. Then on a whim, I took out the 980x cpu, and put in an i7 960 on loan from a friend. Lo behold, VMWare worked again, no more errors. Later on I also put my 980x cpu on his mobo, and was met with the same error message.

So I think there is a high probability that there is some hard-ware related defect with my 980x, though I'm not ruling out the possibility that some features on the cpu might have been turned off by accident and can be turned on with the right software. Furthermore, with the exception mentioned above, my 980x hasn't shown the slightest problem with any other software.

My questions for the experts here are as follows:

  1. Is it possible for a part of the CPU (ie. Virtualization) to fail while rest of the processor functions normally? Shouldn't CPU's self-diagnostic mechanism pick up such failures?

     

  2. Is there any virtualization-specific software that would verify if my CPU's virtualization hardware is working properly?

     

TIA for any help.

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