virtualbox.org

Hello everybody. I had hoped my first post here would be a happy one, but unfortunately I have yet to successfully install an OS on VirtualBox... lol. There have been various reasons for this (mostly unrelated to VB), but this one seems to be something in VB and not the OS itself. Mainly because I've tried 3 different discs (and I mean "different", not just 3 of the same thing).

Thing is... I'm currently trying to install beta versions of Windows 2000. Specifically, builds 1592, 1691, and 1729. All three give me the same exact error, in the same exact place. Instead of trying to explain the situation with words, here are a couple pictures to illustrate the problem.

This is the last thing I see in the setup before the problem (this is *literally* the last thing I see, down to what the setup is trying to load when it happens):


This is the actual BSOD screen I come across a split second after the screen above:


And this is my setup in VirtualBox (most of these settings have been toggled in an attempt to get this working properly):


Probably worth noting (since that "page" doesn't list this particular setting), that I'm using the PIIX3 IDE Controller, though I've tried the other two (PIIX4 and ICH6) too. All three builds are being loaded from a bootable setup image mounted to a virtual drive (Daemon Tools Lite) that VB is reading directly from. Also worth noting that the hard drive is set as IDE primary master, though I've tried SATA too (haven't tried the other two IDE options, though I can't see how those would help anyway). I've also tried without the virtual floppy drive mounted.

If I'm understanding the BSOD correctly, this is more specifically an "Access Violation" error, though I'm not sure what that's really referring to in this case. On the virtual hard drive, I have tried running installation on an unpartitioned drive and also with a partitioned (primary boot) containing FAT32 and NTFS formatting (one at a time, not both... lol).

Though I'm pretty certain it's not the common IDE issue with Windows 2000 installation (as that occurs much further ahead than this), I tried that solution anyway, trying 1 millisecond to 10 millisecond delays, with zero success. And it doesn't seem to be a source issue, since all 3 builds have this same exact problem.

As far as host information goes...

OS: Windows XP Pro SP3 (32-bit)
CPU: Intel Pentium Dual-Core E2200 @ 2.20 GHz
RAM: 3 GB DDR2 PC2-5300
Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 3450 PCI-E x16 (512 MB)
Sound: Realtek HD 7.1 onboard sound

Disable VT-x/AMD-V as a start. You don't need IO APIC either, but it shouldn't matter. The first might be the real issue.

Disabling VT-x/AMD-V is one of the only things I haven't tried yet, but only because the option is grayed out for me. Once I figure out how to change it regardless (via commandline I'm sure it'll end up being...), I'll be back with the results. Thanks for the reply, btw.


Edit: So far, no good. Managed to disable it, but that combined with various other combinations of settings still yielded no different results. Though I didn't mention in the first post (forgot about it), that if I disable ACPI, it goes to the irrelevant BSOD that occurs between the first two screenshots (just the one that identifies the processor before printing out all the actual stop information). That screen comes up either way, but without ACPI, it stops on that screen instead of showing it for a split second and then showing the second screen.

Edit 2: Well, I thought by some odd chance that it might be the Daemon Tools virtual CD/DVD drive that was causing the problem, but loading the image directly through VirtualBox caused the same exact problem, so it's not the virtual drive. I'm starting to run out of ideas, but I'm looking through the documentation to see if there's anything else I could change that might help with this situation.

I also noticed (from testing a Neptune installation) that the CD drive installation line (my first screenshot) is actually the last one before setup actually "starts". So it could also be related to that (though once again, not quite sure what that would mean in this case).

At this point, should I just start to accept that beta versions of Windows 2000 might simply not be compatible with VirtualBox? And if that's the case, does anybody have an idea of why that may be? Just asking because it seems like such an odd problem. And with VirtualBox running NT4 and 2000 just fine, I would normally imagine that an OS that's basically a cross between those two would also run fine.

What I would do is start over and leave everything default. Change nothing until it is fully installed. From what I see you have setup USB, PAE, and io-apic. None of these are needed. Once you have the VM created (before the actual install) go into the machine.xml and set <HardwareVirtEx enabled="false"/> where is says true. After the install you should be able to change some of the settings if you need to.

Thank you for the suggestion. Unfortunately, that yielded the same results as everything else.

Although, thank you very much for pointing me to the "<MachineName>.xml" file. Had you not mentioned it, I would've never found it, and I was hoping to find a file to tweak settings from (instead of commandline like everybody always suggests, which is nice because it can be tweaked while VB is running, but I prefer actual files to work with usually).

I will be trying some other things from the default settings, in the hope that there may still be merit to the idea.


Edit: Still no success with experimenting from default settings.