Warning if installing update "Intel - Other hardware - Intel(R) Extreme Tuning Utility Device Driver" and you use Physical Hard Disks with a VM

I just had this nasty experience after applying some updates. The culprit is most likely "Intel - Other hardware - Intel(R) Extreme Tuning Utility Device Driver".

I have a VM that uses 4 directly attached Physical Hard Disks. For a VM to use these they need to be offline.

This is what happened. The update required a restart. A restart saves the state of a VM before the restart and then resumes it afterwards. The problem was that after this update the drives came up online. The VM failed to resume because it had lost the entries for these disks in settings. Even though I could of course take the disks offline again, I could not add them back to the settings without first deleting the saved state. I did this but was only able to successfully start the VM after another system restart.

So my advice before applying this update.

Shutdown any VMs that use Physical Hard Disks.

Make a note of the entries in Settings for any Physical Hard Disks.

Apply the update, this will cause a system Restart.

After the system has restarted, check the state of the disks and if necessary put the disks offline again.

Check the Settings for your VMs and if necessary add the entries for Physical Hard Disk back.

Do another restart.

Bring up your VMs which should be OK.

Hope that helps someone.

(Note to Microsoft - this situation should not arise and needs a design improvement. The entries in Settings should not be lost just because any offline disks come online after a restart)

Dave