After upgrade to 7.0.6, WinXP guest throws guru meditation

[Dave683]

I have updated to 7.0.6 and now my WinXP guest VM immediately gives me a guru message on boot. Any idea what could have went wrong?

[scottgus1]

There were a couple folks who reported 7.0 being unable to run XP VMs.

7.0 is still in bug-hunt phase, and graphics had a code change.

Please create a ticket in the Bugtracker with the problem description, the manufacturer and model of the host PC's graphics card, the graphics driver version (on the host OS), and a (zipped) VBox.log file.

Then you could downgrade Virtualbox, Extension Pack and Guest Additions to 6.1.something

[fth0]

Any idea what could have went wrong?

Yes, I have two different ideas:

1. You could have so-called security software running on your Windows 10 host that uses a hypervisor. This is known to lead to Guru Meditation -37 (VERR_NOT_SUPPORTED) when it kicks in at arbitrary points in time. For a test, uninstall the security software and see if the issue persists. You could also post a (zipped) VBoxHardening.log file for us to have a look.

2. You've configured a (virtual) parallel port for the VM. The Guru Meditation -37 (VERR_NOT_SUPPORTED) happened when the VirtualBox legacy BIOS tried to detect the (virtual) parallel port by reading the parallel port's control register (long before Windows XP was even started). You could try and remove the (virtual) parallel port from the VM's configuration and see if the issue persists.

[Dave683]

1. You could have so-called security software running on your Windows 10 host that uses a hypervisor. This is known to lead to Guru Meditation -37 (VERR_NOT_SUPPORTED) when it kicks in at arbitrary points in time. For a test, uninstall the security software and see if the issue persists. You could also post a (zipped) VBoxHardening.log file for us to have a look.

Thanks for taking a look. The only security software I'm aware of is the thing built into Windows 10. Here's the VBoxHardening.log.

[fth0]

Thanks for the VBoxHardening.log file. VirtualBox didn't detect any 3rd-party security software AFAICS.

What happened when you tried my second idea? In addition to that, you could try if changing the parallel port configuration on your host has any effect.

[fth0]

FWIW, VirtualBox 7.0 does not support parallel ports on Windows hosts any more (see #21978#comment:2 Virtual machine crashes when trying attach host LPT).