Windows Guest Crashes/Freezes

[Butter1484]

I am having an issue with several Windows based guest VMs that have started happening recently. I have Virtualbox 5.2.22 and my host is running Windows 10 1809 64 bit. I want to focus on the Windows 10 VM I have been trying to troubleshoot at this point and hope the solution will be the same for all of the VMs I am having issues with but will include some information about some of the other VMs as well. This VM does not have Guest Additions installed. It is a 64 bit Windows 10 VM I use for running Insider Builds, it currently has build 18262 installed and 7 GB of RAM out of my total 32 GB. It recently started experiencing green screen crashes for DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE. I tried configuring the power options to disable power saving and also disabling the audio driver in the VM and this has stopped the crashes but now the VM will just freeze instead and I have to reset or power off. This is also an issue in another Windows 10 VM as well as Windows Server 2016 and Windows Server 2012 VMs, although I have not done much testing with those yet to determine if it is the same issue. When the Windows Server VM crashes, my host graphics driver also crashes and my screen goes black for a few seconds until it restarts the graphics driver.

[socratis]

I am having an issue with several Windows based guest VMs

Emphasis mine. That means that it's not isolated to a single VM, the problem is more widespread...

Now, looking at your log, I see several of:

00:25:03.585812 VD#0: Request{0x0000000385aac0}:
00:25:03.585813     Type=WRITE State=ACTIVE Id=0x1 SubmitTs=35636295 {793} Flags=0x2
00:25:03.585814     Offset=56339087360 Size=131072 Left=131072 BufSize=131072

followed by several:

00:25:03.636600 VD#0: Aborted write (0 bytes left) returned rc=VERR_PDM_MEDIAEX_IOREQ_CANCELED
00:25:03.636859 AHCI#0P0: Canceled write at offset 3655208960 (131072 bytes left) returned rc=VERR_PDM_MEDIAEX_IOREQ_CANCELED

All of them are failures that have to do with the disk I/O. I'd say that your host's hard drive is headed for a catastrophe. Start backing up your data. Now.

[Butter1484]

If it is an issue with the drive that's quite unfortunate, as I believe it is my newest drive. S.M.A.R.T. isn't showing anything wrong with it but I'll keep an eye on it. I do have everything backed up already so that 's not an issue. I wonder though why it only seems to be an issue with these Windows guest VMs. I have been able to run Linux guest VMs and have not had this happen.

[socratis]

You never know when/where something is going to bite you. BTW, what is drive "F:\"? External? Internal? Whole disk or partition?

00:00:02.422407 File system of 'F:\VMs\Windows 10 Insider Preview\Insider Preview.vdi' is ntfs

S.M.A.R.T. isn't showing anything wrong

Don't forget to check the Event Viewer as well...

[Butter1484]

It's an internal drive and it's the whole disk. If I run into the issue again today I'll try moving to a different drive and see if that changes anything. I don't see anything that jumps out as being drive related but I'll check again for new events right after the issue happens. There is an error that shows up when I boot the system about an internal drier error on VBoxNetLwf though.

[Butter1484]

So I was able to get that VM to run long enough to complete a build update, which is better than before. I made the same changes to one of the other Windows 10 VMs and I also made a copy of the VM hard drive image on a different drive. The same freezing issue also seems to happen on this drive as well, but I'm not sure that it's quite for the same reason, I tried to look through the logs for the disk I/O messages you mentioned from the other one and don't see them. I've attached those logs. This VM has 5 GB or RAM assigned to it and has video acceleration enabled, but is otherwise the same configuration.

Edit: I ran it again and it froze again, and this time there were the same lines

[socratis]

It's a good thing that you included the VBoxHardening.log in your Crash.zip. I want you to completely uninstall all Avast related software, and Malwarebytes SwissArmy. Don't simply disable them, uninstall them completely. Then try again...

[Butter1484]

It seems to be much better, I haven't had any freezing at all today so far. My guess is Avast had an update that kind of broke things? I had been running them both without issue for years without this issue so I hadn't considered that being the problem.

[socratis]

All 3rd party antivirus are a problem. I personally see them as causing more problems in reality, than they advertise as potentially preventing.

Keep it running for a couple of days like that and please let us know so that I can mark the thread as [Solved].