virtualbox.org

hello All,

I had the insane idea of trying to modify my XP guest settings to see if I could boost the performance.

I set two processors, and I *think* I recall being told that IO APIC was required.

Something went wrong and I disabled the second processor, but I think I forgot to remove the IO APIC flag.

To make a long story short, now I can't boot into Windows, unless in recovery mode, and even if I removed the APIC flag.

The machine cycles rebooting when it comes to the window CTRL-ALT-CANC.

Is there anything I can do to fix the situation?

thanks for reading,
-Gian

Nothing you describe could have damaged the VM (AFAIK anyway), provided you put everything back as it was before. Yes, multiple cores requires the IO APIC, but you can't just change the IO APIC setting after XP is installed. It's the equivalent of replacing your motherboard with a radically different one... and XP he no like.

But, if you turn IO APIC off and set nCPUs back to 1 then it should be fixed. Something else must have been done otherwise.

It might have already replaced the single processor kernel with the multi processor kernel. If that is the case you need to (as mpack said) put it back as it was and then search for HALu to see if it can put the single processor kernel back.

HALu site:forums.virtualbox.org in google

I tried solutions posted in other discussions without luck, then I decided to go for the brute force, and following a post I had seen, I renamed processr.sys and intelppm.sys and rebooted.

Now it works.

Should I put the files back now?

If it's working I would leave it. Still, nothing you described in your OP should have led to a problem fixed the way you fixed it. I think some info is missing.

I gladly would add some info, to the benfit of other users, but I don't know exactly what to look for...