VB and GA 5.1.26 break screen resolution (GA install fails)

[Tibor]

Hi there,

I've upgraded to 5.1.26 a few days ago and tried running my old Win8.1 VM yesterday. The screen resolution was low, as commonly before installing GA.
I hence downloaded and started a GA installation from within VirtualBox, which failed (some installation packages apparently exiting with return code 2, the exact output changes too fast to read).
I subsequently tried deinstalling the old GA first (which failed in the first attempt, but worked after rebooting), tried installing the GA from my distro's repo (currently: Ubuntu), tried re-installing virtualbox and the GA entirely, but the problem persists.

Searching on the Web I found the trick of enabling 3D-accelaration and auto-limiting the guest resolution, tried the entire phalanx of de- and reinstallations again, but to no avail - the installation of GA 5.1.26 still fails with some return codes 2 and low screen resolution.

I attempted installing everything from the original vb sources, tried installing from the repos as indicated on the web page, tried downgrading to an older distribution but I'm stuck.

Any ideas?

[mpack]

I've upgraded to 5.1.26 a few days ago and tried running my old Win8.1 VM yesterday. The screen resolution was low, as commonly before installing GA.

If it's an old VM then it surely had the GAs installed already?

Tell me you haven't been using snapshots and copying VDIs around?

[Tibor]

Hi mpack,

thanks for your help!

The VM has GA installed already, but the resolution is low and win8.1 doesn't offer any higher resolutions. Since this was the usual "install GA" trigger that's what I tried

Btw: I didn't move anything around, I simply upgraded my distro, which then came with 5.1.26, the VBox folders (including the config folder) remained untouched.

I do regular backups, so other then for testing purposes I've never taken snapshots.

[mpack]

I still don't understand. Reinstalling the GAs will do nothing at all for display sizes. Only running the guest's display config tool will do that.