Black screen in Windows VMs

[Adlopa]

I've just upgraded from VB 2.2.4 to 3.0.6 and now all of my Windows VMs only display a black screen when they've booted. Windows is working and parts of the display appear where the context menu is if I right-click the screen. The whole screen appears if I resize the window, but it goes black as soon as it lose focus. I'm running the latest Guest Additions.

I've seen other posts about this problem, but can't track down a Mac OS fix. Help!

[adsworth]

Hi,

if you have 2 monitors attached to your Mac, then try moving the VM window to the other (main) monitor.
That worked for me.

adi

[Adlopa]

Hm, interesting — all VMs are fine on monitor 1 (the iMac monitor) and only blank on monitor 2. Looks like we're not alone with this, either: http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=22207.

[adsworth]

Hm, interesting — all VMs are fine on monitor 1 (the iMac monitor) and only blank on monitor 2. Looks like we're not alone with this, either: http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=22207.

and as someone in that thread found out and I could just confirm on my setup.
Using the same color profile on both monitors fixes the problem.
The colors do look a little strange though.

adi

[Adlopa]

Weirder still, I've just reinstalled the 3.0.6 VM additions for the second time to try out one of the other solutions in that other thread and after rebooting, this has fixed the problem for both Windows XP and Windows 7, without doing anything else. It made no difference to my Vista VM, though.

[tsmori]

Matching the color profile for both monitors didn't help me. I've got 2 Apple Cinema displays. Going to try reinstalling the guest additions to see if that helps.

[horse-archer]

This is a rather old thread, but please let me know if I should start a new one. My problem is the very much the same although the softwares have been updated.

Mac OS X - 10.10.2
VirtualBox - 4.3.26
MS Vista Business

I had just activated an old Windows Vista VM after moving it to a new Mac (10.10.2) with an external monitor and suddenly started getting a black screen. I removed the external monitor and am still seeing the same thing.

I'm attaching a log.

[later]
After looking at ticket #9330, I'm thinking the black screen started after installing the guest box additions.

[loukingjr]

the first thing I would try is reducing the RAM assigned to the guest from 8GB to 2GB.

edit: also 24MB assigned to VRAM is an invalid setting. Try 128MB.

[horse-archer]

Thanks for the reply! I set the VRAM to 128MB. Setting the base RAM lower than 6MB gives "no physical memory is available at the location required for the windows boot manager". (See attached). At 6 MB, I still get a black screen.

[loukingjr]

Thanks for the reply! I set the VRAM to 128MB. Setting the base RAM lower than 6MB gives "no physical memory is available at the location required for the windows boot manager". (See attached). At 6 MB, I still get a black screen.

2GB not 2MB

[horse-archer]

Doh! Thanks that did it!

[loukingjr]

welcome