Win10 Guest keeps crashing under Mac OS Host.

[Simon22]

I started to use VirtualBox with version 6.1.8 on my Mac Mini (Catalina 10.15.4 at the time now 10.15.5).

I have a Windows 10 guest that was created from a physical computer.

Usually, the guest would crash right after the Win10 OS was finished loading. I would then restart the guest and it would work correctly for a week or so.

Lately, I upgraded VirtualBox to 6.1.10 and the issue has gotten worse. The guest crashes many times. Especially when I try to "minimize" (command-H) the guest window.

Sometimes it crashes by itself after several hours I did not access the guest at all.

My crash log is hereby attached:

VirtualBoxVM_Crash_Log_2020-06-18.txt

(87.32 KiB) Downloaded 24 times

[Simon22]

New crash this morning ...

Right after I minimized the guest window.

New crash log:

VirtualBox Crash Log 2020-06-20.txt

(91.77 KiB) Downloaded 11 times

[scottgus1]

Start the guest from full normal shutdown, not save-state. Run until you see the problem happen, then shut down the guest from within the guest OS if possible. If not possible, close the Virtualbox window for the guest with the Power Off option set.

Right-click the guest in the main Virtualbox window's guest list, choose Show Log. Save the far left tab's log, zip it, and post the zip file, using the forum's Upload Attachment tab.

Also try a fresh Windows 10 installed from new ISO media. See if that crashes too.

[Simon22]

Start the guest from full normal shutdown, not save-state. Run until you see the problem happen, then shut down the guest from within the guest OS if possible. If not possible, close the Virtualbox window for the guest with the Power Off option set.

I restarted the Win10 guest, then performed a normal shutdown. I powered it up again and ran until the next crash. The crash closes the VM's window completely so there's nothing left to power off. The VirtualBox Manager shows the VM as "Aborted".

Right-click the guest in the main Virtualbox window's guest list, choose Show Log. Save the far left tab's log, zip it, and post the zip file, using the forum's Upload Attachment tab.

Here's the requested zip:

Titan-2020-06-23-12-25-46.log.zip

(20.99 KiB) Downloaded 12 times

Thanks for your help.

[Simon22]

I did some more research on the Internet and found a forum discussion that mentioned a change in the "Security & Privacy" section of the Mac OS preferences.

The change involves unchecking all VirtualBox references under "Input Monitoring". In other words, to not allow the host to monitor keyboard input.

It's been a few days that I made the change and had no crash yet.

But, I can no longer copy paste from host to guest and vice-versa.


Although not being able to copy/paste is really annoying, I will keep things like that for now.

[scottgus1]

I don't see anything unusual in the setup of the guest. There's a lot of timer entries toward the end of the log that look unusual, but I am not certain what those mean.

How does the fresh new Windows 10 guest perform?

[Simon22]

How does the fresh new Windows 10 guest perform?

scottgus1, thanks for taking the time to look into my logs.

Unfortunately, I did not take the time to setup a fresh Windows 10 VM. My schedule is quite busy and I need to use the VM. Also, it wouldn't help me much because, even if it proved stable, because I would have to start over and re-install all my programs, settings and files and this is not desirable right now.

As per my last post, since I disabled "Input Monitoring" in Security and Privacy of Mac OS, I haven't got any crash. So, my guess is that Oracle will have to look into their "Copy/Paste" operations from and to the guest VM and possibly the "Hide/Show" of the VM window as well because these were the operations I was performing when the crashes occurred.

[scottgus1]

A P2V'd OS has been through a Frankenstein experience. You essentially took the brain out of one body and put it in another body. Some glitches are likely to occur. Determining the source of glitches as coming from the P2V'd guest instead of the host helps us figure out whether help can be given.

The purpose of testing the stability of the new guest is to determine if it is Virtualbox or your Mac that has the problem, instead of the P2V'd guest OS itself.

if you wish to continue with the workaround, that's perfectly fine. If you start having crashes again, we would need the result of the fresh new guest test to see if we could help further.