Intermittent hang on NT4 startup

[Royce]

About 1 in 5 starts of NT4 guest hang and never recover. The startup gets past the boot screen and shows the desktop but then hangs before any icons appear in the system tray. Usually the Guest Additions and Intel ProSet icon should appear.

I suspect it has something to do with loading guest additions, but there's nothing in the windows Event Log. Have tried reinstalling guest additions but that didn't help. From the VBox logs I see this during a failed start:

Code: Select all

00:00:25.000579 VMMDev: vmmDevHeartbeatFlatlinedTimer: Guest seems to be unresponsive. Last heartbeat received 4 seconds ago

And successful start has this line instead of the above:

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00:00:25.806271 VMMDev: Guest Additions capability report: (0x0 -> 0x4) seamless: no, hostWindowMapping: no, graphics: yes

Trying to run a script on the guest via VBboxManage returns an error that the guest is still starting up. Guest has to be killed and then restarted.

Guest: NT4 SP6a
Host: Debian Linux 64

[mpack]

I see mention of VRDP in the log. Are you using RDP?

[Royce]

I see mention of VRDP in the log. Are you using RDP?

I configured it recently - after I discovered the issue. In other words, I had the issue regardless of RDP being configured and I wasn't using RDP when the startup hung. It was all done with the VBox GUI.

[michaln]

Obvious question: Does the same problem happen without the Guest Additions?

[Royce]

Obvious question: Does the same problem happen without the Guest Additions?

I just tested it - problem persists with additions uninstalled.

For the hanging startup, the log ends with:

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00:00:45.257350 VMMDev: SetVideoModeHint: Got a video mode hint (1152x864x4)@(0x0),(1;0) at 0

The error in the good startup about failing to take a screenshot had nothing to do with me as I didn't attempt to take a screen shot. Also in the good log everything from the VRDP connection after was not part of the bootup - that was me connecting to the VM and starting the shutdown process.