Win2K3 SP2 Guest can only run in 640x480 'safe' display mode

[kmrdeva]

Hi,

I'm having VirtualBox 3.0.2 running in Vista SP2 (32bit) with 1 guest OS, a Windows 2003 Server Std Edition installation with 3D Display Acceleration enabled. I found that after installing the 3.0.2 Guest Additions (in safe mode) and rebooting, my guest's display got stuck at 640x480 4bit and nothing I did allowed me to go up to my preferred resolution and colour depth (1024x768 32bit).

However, when I go to the guest's Device Manager and uninstall the Virtualbox Graphics Adapter driver and reboot, the guest's display comes back to normal (allowing 1024x768 32bit) with the built in Standard VGA Graphics Adapter (from Microsoft).

Can someone help advise how I can go about fixing/troubleshooting this issue?

[kmrdeva]

I think I found the solution or workaround, but I don't know the real reason for my problem:

1. I had added a SATA controller and moved the guest's hard drive to Sata Port 0 (from IDE Primary Master).
2. This guest OS was originally created under VirtualBox 3.0.0, so maybe there is a connection to that.

I tested by creating a new and fresh Win2K3 Std SP2 guest under VirtualBox 3.0.2 - everything came up fine with the hard drive in IDE Primary Master, and when I enabled the additional SATA controller, booted into the guest, installed the SATA driver (from Intel), shutdown the guest and finally reconfigured the 'hard drive' to SATA 0, the guest booted up and there were no issues with the display resolution or colour depth. So, maybe the issue's got something to do with reason (2) above.

Anyway, I have reconfigured my old guest to IDE as I don't have the time to re-create my test environment in the fresh 3.0.2 guest.