virtualbox.org

Greetings:

I just completed replacing my motherboard, CPU, and RAM. The old hardware included an AMD FX-8350, eight-core CPU. The new hardware includes an AMD Ryzen 7-1700x, eight core CPU. Windows 7 is not supported on the new AM4 chipset (Ryzen), so I had to install Windows 10 on the host. My VirtualBox data is kept on a second drive that was not effected by the OS change, so getting VirtualBox back in operation required only a re-install of VirtualBox itself, 5.1.26, and then adding the VMs into the console. So far, so good.

The problem I'm running into is strange, I think. A Windows 7 VM I've got sees the processor as the Ryzen and complains about it not being supported on that chipset. A Windows 10 VM still sees the processor as the FX. I don't understand how or where the VMs get their processor information, but I'd love to be able to change the Windows 7 VM back to thinking it's still on the FX processor.

Any knowledge regarding this is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!!

Try the following profiles, of course while booting your VM in between the changes:

• 
  VBoxManage modifyvm "<VM name>" --cpu-profile "Intel Xeon X5482 3.20GHz"
  VBoxManage modifyvm "<VM name>" --cpu-profile "Intel Core i7-2635QM"
  VBoxManage modifyvm "<VM name>" --cpu-profile "Intel Core i7-3960X"
  VBoxManage modifyvm "<VM name>" --cpu-profile "Intel Core i5-3570"
  VBoxManage modifyvm "<VM name>" --cpu-profile "Intel Core i7-5600U"
  VBoxManage modifyvm "<VM name>" --cpu-profile "Intel Core i7-6700K"
  

Start with the last one. No clue if it will work or not. A test will prove me right or wrong...

OK, this broke the VM altogether. Wouldn't boot at all. This is an AMD host, not Intel. I was then able to restore a snapshot taken prior to trying the changes.

I went to http://www.cpu-world.com/cgi-bin/CPUID.pl?CPUID=22328 to try to get the cpu-profile for that processor, but couldn't get anything to work there, either.

Thanks, anyway!!

nlcarter wrote:OK, this broke the VM altogether. Wouldn't boot at all.

Well, yes... you are lying to the guest OS about what the processor is. What could possibly go wrong?

Be glad it wasn't subtle this time.

nlcarter wrote: I was then able to restore a snapshot taken prior to trying the changes.

Or you could have issued the --cpu-profile command again with an empty argument. BTW, the snapshot restore wouldn't help, as the ExtraData that changes the CPU is not part of the snapshot.

Greetings:

Well, the snapshot DID return things to a working status, and the system still saw the Ryzen processor. Odd, I guess.

Anyway, I just tried your suggestion again this evening, and this time it appears to be working! Must have had some sort of fluke last time. The System Properties now shows an Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700K CPU@ 4.00GHz 3.39GHz.

I'm hoping that Windows Update won't try to download Intel system drivers or something like that, thinking it's what it's not.

Anyway, if this continues to work, this may be a solution to everyone upgrading their host PC to a newer generation CPU but wanting to continue operating Windows 7 guests. For what it's worth, this DOES seem to get around the Microsoft warning about running Windows 7 on unsupported hardware, which appears to preclude getting further Windows updates.

Thanks for the assistance!!!

nlcarter wrote:Anyway, I just tried your suggestion again this evening, and this time it appears to be working!

Thanks for the feedback. Marking as [Solved].

great answer. this "--cpu-profile "Intel Core i7-6700K" allow use of and updates for windows 8.1 embedded on i7-8700 cpu. it even stopped the vm requesting activation because of the physical hardware change it saw without the modifymv.

Thank you

succesfull with these code: Thanks guy

@WilsonTuyen
Careful there... you're treading in thin ice. You're on a Windows host, and you're talking about an OSX guest. That's a really rare, legitimate combination and only if you have installed Windows on your Apple computer. Otherwise, take a look at the thread "OSX guests on non-Apple hardware" and be careful...

socratis wrote:Try the following profiles, of course while booting your VM in between the changes:

• 
  VBoxManage modifyvm "<VM name>" --cpu-profile "Intel Xeon X5482 3.20GHz"
  VBoxManage modifyvm "<VM name>" --cpu-profile "Intel Core i7-2635QM"
  VBoxManage modifyvm "<VM name>" --cpu-profile "Intel Core i7-3960X"
  VBoxManage modifyvm "<VM name>" --cpu-profile "Intel Core i5-3570"
  VBoxManage modifyvm "<VM name>" --cpu-profile "Intel Core i7-5600U"
  VBoxManage modifyvm "<VM name>" --cpu-profile "Intel Core i7-6700K"
  

Start with the last one. No clue if it will work or not. A test will prove me right or wrong...

Hello, is there any way to know what are the cpu profile names which are in virtualbox's CPU database ?

socratis wrote:Try the following profiles, of course while booting your VM in between the changes:

• 
  VBoxManage modifyvm "<VM name>" --cpu-profile "Intel Xeon X5482 3.20GHz"
  VBoxManage modifyvm "<VM name>" --cpu-profile "Intel Core i7-2635QM"
  VBoxManage modifyvm "<VM name>" --cpu-profile "Intel Core i7-3960X"
  VBoxManage modifyvm "<VM name>" --cpu-profile "Intel Core i5-3570"
  VBoxManage modifyvm "<VM name>" --cpu-profile "Intel Core i7-5600U"
  VBoxManage modifyvm "<VM name>" --cpu-profile "Intel Core i7-6700K"
  

Start with the last one. No clue if it will work or not. A test will prove me right or wrong...

can i assume that i can just use "i7-7700K" and "i7-8700K" and so on? have these been added yet? I also have a laptop with "i7-10510U"<---- what should i use for these three processors?

thanks

Why would you want to add processors which would not solve the problem? You are trying to pretend that you have an old processor which is not too new for Windows 7/8/8.1 ! The list ends at 6700 because anything starting with 7 or higher is too new.

CPU profiles are used to deny the guest capabilities of the host CPU. There exist only a very few of them, which were needed for some special use cases in the past. Most modern OSs check for the availability of CPU capabilities before using them, so they automatically adapt to the host CPU.