Windows 8?

[Arsby]

Thanks to those who made suggestions about why this is not working for me... trying to get Win8 consumer to work in a Vista host.

It seems no matter what I do, or what modifications I make, all I get is this. Can someone tell me how to install Guest Additions, that seems to have worked for someone and when I go to Devices / Install Guest Additions nothing happens.

I get this and can't do anything.

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[selden]

What is showing in the bottom half of the Win8 screen? VB's window scrollbar in your screengrab is at the top of its range, so we can't see the bottom of the Win8 screen.

I think your problem is that Win8 hasn't gotten far enough in its boot sequence. It's not yet in a state where the GA can be installed. The virtual system might (or might not) be hung.

What's your network connectivity like? Remember that WCP is highly instrumented and wants to connect to MS servers. If your VM doesn't have a network connection, it may take some time before all of Win8's network connection attempts time out. I don't know how soon in the boot sequence they start, though, or how much they slow it down. Hopefully someone with a network monitoring package (e.g. wireshark) can comment.

On my system, the fish on a black background was present only during the boot sequence. After a while the "looping dots" busy indicator showed up in the lower half of that screen. Eventually the busy indicator stopped and the black screen was replaced by the login screen. Someone else will have to describe the screens that show up when you enter "Safe Mode". I haven't gotten that far yet. Traditionally the words "Safe Mode" are drawn all around the screen's border.

[Vjetar]

Well, after couple of hours picking in Windows 8 CP in VirtualBox, I had to uninstall Guest Additions in order to install Visual Studio 11 Beta.
Installer won't start with GA installed.

It's still pre-beta.

[Arsby]

What is showing in the bottom half of the Win8 screen? VB's window scrollbar in your screengrab is at the top of its range, so we can't see the bottom of the Win8 screen.

I think you can use the scroll bars on the inline image to scroll down to the bottom of the screen and to the right to see the bunch of icons representing the SATA controller, the DVD/CDs, through to the home key.

I think your problem is that Win8 hasn't gotten far enough in its boot sequence. It's not yet in a state where the GA can be installed. The virtual system might (or might not) be hung.

I changed the boot sequence to go directly to the CD/DVD (it had been going to the floppy first), and now instead of getting nothing I get an error right as those little dots are circling, even before the first input-capable screen comes up. Did I do something wrong or is this just my bad luck?

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[Twisted Lucidity]

Arsby, you need to get into safe mode, there are two ways depending on how stable Win8 is.

The first
1) Boot the Win8 guest
2) Follow the steps in the ZDNet article linke dearlier in this thread
3) Boot to safe mode
4) Install

The second
1) Boot the Win8 guest
2) Press F8 repeatedly
3) The boot will appear to hang - power off the guest
4) Boot the guest again and leave it. It will eventually go to a troubleshooting page
5) Select various troubleshoot/advanced option (sorry, I can't remember the exact options; but "Safe Mode" is an option once you dig down a few levels)
6) The guest will now reboot and let you log into safe mode
7) I suggest creating the "Safe Mode" boot option as explained in the ZDNet article

To be honest, unless you have a very powerful host with lots of RAM it's really not worth is. I have Core2 Duo with 4Gb and with 256Mb video and 2Gb assigned to Win8, it is unusable. I have host multiple other OSs without issue.

If my experience translates into hardware, many people are going to have to buy brand new, high-end equipment to run Win8.

[ipig]

The most exasperating user interface problem that I've encountered is sometimes having to click twice on buttons before they're recognized.

Having this problem off/on on my intel machine too.

[Technologov]

Myself not sure why does Win8 requires VT-x to work in VBox, but I would like to find out...

Also the OS itself:
Is there a way to add start button (and menu, ala Windows XP or 7 style) ? Kinda hard to work...
Windows 8. Idiotic design. I bet it will under-sell Windows Vista. (@_@)

[Arsby]

...
To be honest, unless you have a very powerful host with lots of RAM it's really not worth is. I have Core2 Duo with 4Gb and with 256Mb video and 2Gb assigned to Win8, it is unusable. I have host multiple other OSs without issue.

If my experience translates into hardware, many people are going to have to buy brand new, high-end equipment to run Win8.

First of all, thank you for the well-considered suggestions. I've never put a VM into safe mode, there's always a first time.

However, from what you're saying about system requirements, it looks like that may be a lost cause, since my laptop only has a total of 3GB ram. Not such a bad thing, since the only reason I'm trying to do this is to impress my friends out of curiosity.

BTW, great nickname.

[freezesicle]

I installed win8 using the zdnet article and everything went fine. i installed GA and it works too.

I got the intermittent freezing (using AMD II X4 640) so I set the VM to use all cores as suggested in another post. All is ok.

But i am clueless on WDDM. Where do I get this from hahahaha? I haven't been keeping up with this but I want to update the graphic driver to use aero.

thanks for any help u can give. i read through the whole thread but didn't see anything about it. using VB 4.1.8. win7 home premium 64-bit.

btw my initial impression of win8 is not good. dunno maybe this will grow on me or maybe is for tablets. i have to work with it some more i guess.

[GTA_doum]

Hello,

Sometimes I'm lucky and Windows 8 CP 32 bits starts and runs fine until next reboot... But most of the time, it hangs while booting, before showing the rounding points.
In the log, the last entry is "RTC: period=0x200 (512) 64 Hz"

What's loading at this step ? Anyway to resolve this so it could boot each time

Thanks.
----------
Update:
What comes after that point is initialization of USB driver. If the Guest Additions are installed, they also load at that step. Tried to uncheck the USB, but it is still doing the hangup on startup ! So have to be patient and restart until it starts !
The problem is not present with the 64 bits of Windows 8. Even the PAE/NX option does not have to be selected for 64 bits version, but has to be selected with the 32 bits version, otherwise there is an error 260 on the BSOF screen (Saw that on another forum, someone wanted to call the new blue screen, the "Blue Screen Of Fail" ! ).

I also tried the chipset options, and they all work well ! The CD only works in IDE mode. In SATA, Windows crash displaying an hardware error.

For the guest additions, if tried to install with the D3D option, it installs without having to be in Safe Mode, but video does not initialize on next start.
In Device Manager, if update driver is done on the video, the regular VBox driver can be selected, but it gives an error afterward that it is not for this version of Windows...

[Suz]

Hi Group,

I have built my Win8 x64 profile twice already, and it still hangs on startup most of the time. I can eventually get it to load if I reboot enough times. The last entry in my log is also:

00:00:08.032 Display::handleDisplayResize(): uScreenId = 0, pvVRAM=0000000009430000 w=1024 h=768 bpp=24 cbLine=0xC00, flags=0x1
00:00:14.054 RTC: period=0x200 (512) 64 Hz

Has anyone found a fix? My host OS is Vista, and I have a ATI Radeon HD 3450 graphics card. I maxed my video memory in the profile at 128MB, but that got me nowhere. Thanks.

[fatbuttlarry]

I'm running Windows 8 x64 on top of Linux Mint 12 x64 "Lisa" and it works very well.

Biggest problem is that the Metro Apps won't work with Guest Additions + Experimental Direct3D, but dynamic screen resizing won't work without Experimental Direct3D.

I typed up a blog about it, which anyone can feel free to copy/paste here. It may contain some useful pointers.

http://fatbuttlarry.blogspot.com/2012/0 ... ows-8.html

[ipig]

I tried for a while to get GE working but ultimately ended up with a bang on the driver in device mangler saying it didn't initialize properly. (used safe mode too)

[karl_w_w]

Got the display driver working on 32 bit guest (screenshot: i43.tinypic[dot]com/2i8bsxx.png), 32 bit win 7 host. dxdiag reports 3D acceleration is working, but any time I try to use it, in a game or even to run the windows assessment thing, the program trying to use it crashes. Still, it's nice that I can now change the screen res, and switch the VM out of fullscreen mode without it crashing

Here's how I did it:
install GA with this command: vboxwindowsadditions-x86 /depth=32 /force /with_d3d /xres=1366 /yres=768
it will error but that's fine, go to the install folder in program files
give yourself ownership of this folder and then give yourself write permissions
edit vboxvideo.inf:

Code: Select all   Expand viewCollapse view

in the [Version] section add this line:
Compatible = 1

under [Manufacturer] change the line to this:
%ORACLE%=Model, NTx86

change [Model] to this:
[Model.NTx86]

Now at this stage I did a little tinkering so I'm not exactly what is necessary, it could be you can go straight to the next stage, or it could be that a restart is required, or it could be you have to run "vboxdrvinst driver install vboxvideo", it might even be that you have to run "vboxcontrol setvideomode 1366 768 32" first, but that seems unlikely.

Go to the device manager
Right click the generic display adapter
Click update driver software
Browse my computer for driver software
Type or browse to C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox Guest Additions
Click next and you're done

Sadly, can't get shared folders to work. The shared clipboard works though, which is handy. An odd thing I've noticed is no matter what I try I can't get it to my screen's native res, 1366x768, it keeps giving me 1360x768.

[Vjetar]

Sadly, can't get shared folders to work. The shared clipboard works though, which is handy.

Shared folders works as expected in my case.
64bit Windows 8 guest on 64bit Windows 7 host.