Guest Win XP Pro SP3 Crashes on Boot splashscreen.

[Perryg]

Few things to check:

Try setting the guest memory to 2048 to see if it will go ahead and boot.
Try turning off the USB part for now to see if it will allow a boot.
Since you said it stopped booting after a series of updates it may be you do not have any drive space available look and see how much HD space is left.
Only other thing that I can think of that would cause Windows to shutdown itself is too many files in the root of Windows, you can have a Max. of 255 files in the root.

[hammer]

> Try setting the guest memory to 2048 to see if it will go ahead and boot.

doesn't help

> Try turning off the USB part for now to see if it will allow a boot.

doesn't help

> Since you said it stopped booting after a series of updates it may be you do not have any drive space available
> look and see how much HD space is left.

10Gb hd space is left...

> Only other thing that I can think of that would cause Windows to shutdown itself is too many files in the root of Windows, you can have a Max. of 255 files in the root.

checked. less than 255.

[vbox4me2]

Create a new VM and attach VDI to that.

[hammer]

Create a new VM and attach VDI to that.

tried. same result.

[vbox4me2]

Recovery/repair mode from xp install cd ?

[bensonpeck@gmail.com]

Evidently Hammer and I have the same or a very similar problem.

I'm running Avast! anti-virus in the Win XP Guest. Memory is fine, plenty of space left on the drive...
I tried creating a new VM and attaching the VDI to it - same problem results.
I also tried changing USB settings / shutting off USB - same problem results.

[vbox4me2]

If this is really backtracked to patches you will have to resort to using a linuxcd or bartpe to reverse the patches manually.

[bensonpeck@gmail.com]

Well I've given up and just reinstalled everything. It took a few hours, but I decided it wasn't worth the time investment to figure out what went wrong. Thanks to everyone who gave advice/tried to help!

[horsey]

On a Win 2000 guest, Microsoft's hotfix http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968537 causes the VM to power off before it gets as far as the login screen. Booting the VM from CD enables you to remove the "fix" at a Recovery Console, which resolves the issue. The hotfix applies to XP too, so it may have been the problem here.