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2 windows guests, 3 windows 2000 installation failures – Sun Microsystems VIRTUALBOX VERSION 3.1.0_BETA2 User Manual

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11 Troubleshooting

VBoxManage setextradata VMNAME

"VBoxInternal/Devices/ahci/0/LUN#[x]/Config/IgnoreFlush" 0

The value [x] that selects the disk can be a value between 0 and 29.
Note that this doesn’t affect the flushes performed according to the configuration

described in chapter

11.1.2

,

Guest shows IDE/SATA errors for file-based images on slow

host file system

, page

155

. Restoring the default of ignoring flush commands is possible

by setting the value to 1 or by removing the key.

11.2 Windows guests

11.2.1 Windows bluescreens after changing VM configuration

Often, customers encounter Windows startup failures (the infamous “blue screen”)
after performing configuration changes to a virtual machine which are not allowed
for an already installed Windows operating system. Depending on the presence of
several hardware features, the Windows installation program chooses special kernel
and device driver versions and will fail to startup should these hardware features be
removed.

Most importantly, never disable ACPI and the I/O APIC if they were enabled at

installation time. Enabling them for a Windows VM which was installed without them
does not cause any harm. However, Windows will not use these features in this case.

11.2.2 Windows 0x101 bluescreens with SMP enabled (IPI

timeout)

If a VM is configured to have more than one processor (symmetrical multiprocessing,
SMP), some configurations of Windows guests crash with an 0x101 error message,
indicating a timeout for inter-processor interrupts (IPIs). These interrupts synchronize
memory management between processors.

According to Microsoft, this is due to a race condition in Windows. A hotfix is

available.

1

If this does not help, please reduce the number of virtual processors to 1.

11.2.3 Windows 2000 installation failures

When installing Windows 2000 guests, you might run into one of the following issues:

• Installation reboots, usually during component registration.

• Installation fills the whole hard disk with empty log files.

• Installation complains about a failure installing msgina.dll.

1

See

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/955076

.

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