Black Screen problem

[jbm715]

So I am running Xubuntu 10.10 guest on a Windows 7 host. Everything works great except when I leave the guest OS for a while to do stuff on the host OS. After a while of inactivity, VirtualBox will just show a black screen. If I hit the close button though, I can see the guest OS with a partially see-through black overlay. If I hit cancel it goes right back to the black screen. It is weird because I can save the machine state and/or send the shutdown signal. Once I open the saved state or turn on the guest OS again, everything is fine. I thought it might have something to do with the screen saver so I completely turned that off but to no avail. Is this a common problem?

-James

[rmflagg]

Hi everyone,

I, like the previous poster, have just encountered this problem. I am running VBox under Ubuntu 10.04 and the Guest OS is Debian 6.0.

After an inactive period of 15-20 minutes, the screen goes black AND goes from the desktop that it resides and shows up on the active desktop if different.
The screen is still active, just black. If I Pause the guest OS, I can see in the current screen state in the window-shaded screen. I can't get the black screen to go away.

Any ideas?

[BillG]

It sounds like the guest is going into sleep/suspend mode. Check the power management settings in the guest OS.

[kimmoj]

It is not (for me) a powersaving issue in the guest. Viewing the little preview screen in the main VirtualBox window shows the screen contents in miniature, and you can do things like shutting it down (if you remember the keyboard combos and can decipher the screen) blindly.

Windows 7 and 4.0.2 for me.

Upgrading to 4.0.4 now to see if that helps, though.

[oboontoo]

This started happening for me after upgrading to the 4.x line.

I can see the VM desktop in the preview window and see the mouse moving around (albeit very hard to see).

One workaround is to go into scale mode "host C" which will get rid of the black screen (and then you can go back to normal mode again if you'd like with host C again.)

Definitely a VirtualBox 4.x bug.


Martin

[walking_dude]

I have woken up the black screen by going to Machine -> ACPI shutdown and it woke it up, it appears on a real machine you need to hit the power button to wake it from sleep.
I was running OpenSuSE Leap 42.2 on WIndows 10 and Virtualbox 5.xx.

[Fatima]

That works!!! thank you @walking_dude

[mpack]

Hmm. Topic creating in 2010, discussing VirtualBox 4.x. Time to retire it I think.

IME, you need to disable all (disk and screen) power saving sleep modes in your VM, as they don't really serve a purpose: the host manages physical resources.