virtualbox.org

I've been using VirtualBox for quite some time for pretty much everything I would otherwise need to reboot my system for. It's a great time-saver, thanks to the guys developing this software.

Now recently I gave my PC quite an upgrade in a few respects and ever since then any Linux distro I try to install with VB winds up erroring out when GRUB starts to load. It wasn't as much of a problem before since I didn't really need to use it, but recently I've been helping with some projects that require cross-platform and basic penetration testing which would be more difficult to do in Windows.

Here's the logs and screen shot, I hope I can get some help on this matter.
Apologies, I had to zip everything up. It was a bit big.

Did your upgrade procedure involve you cloning or exporting this VM, or cloning the disks?

mpack wrote:Did your upgrade procedure involve you cloning or exporting this VM, or cloning the disks?

Nope, everything including the host OS was a fresh install (Windows freaked out after the upgrade and refused to boot)

00:19:43.545091 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
00:19:43.545093 !!
00:19:43.545093 !! Guru Meditation 1155 (VINF_EM_TRIPLE_FAULT)
00:19:43.552440 !!

We've been seeing a few of these lately, cause is not yet determined, although there has been recent speculation that it only happens with AMD FX series multi-core CPUs. In your case I see you've assigned 3 cores to the guest, plus I also see the following lines in the log :-

VBox.log wrote: 00:00:02.115984 Logical host processors: 6 present, 6 max, 6 online, online mask: 000000000000003f
00:00:02.116146 Physical host cores: 3

Perhaps try configuring your VM with one core.

Hi I found a fix for me at least:

Disable the: Enable PAE/NX tick box.
I cant post a screenshot because this is my first post, You can find this option in the processor tab of system settings.

Hopefully helps you

EDIT: Ok that doesnt work the VM booted once

If this helps in anyway I have a AMD FX CPU.

mpack wrote:Perhaps try configuring your VM with one core.

Tried that earlier, unfortunately it still didn't work
I also tried disabling PAE/NX on top of the single-core.

I changed some other settings as well, hopefully one day a new version will come out that fixes this issue and I can just boot into the OS.
Speaking of, booting into a live CD with the VM works quite well. I just don't want to do that because I like having updated tools.

Quick edit: Disabling nested paging and PAE/NX seems to resolve the issue? It's booted for the first time; I might've just been very lucky, though.

Host OS: Win 7 Ultimate
VM OS: Kali Linux (probably works for all Debian-based distros at the very least)
Processor: AMD FX 6300 six-core

Disabling nested paging seems to work 100% of the time, number of cores and PAE/NX doesn't seem to matter.

Thanks for that last tip, that will be useful in answering this issue when it comes up again. It may also help the devs.