virtualbox.org

Hi all,

I have been trying to sort this out for a couple to three days now and its driving me up the wall. When doing a fresh install of win2008 trial , it installs and load fine till it preparing desktop and then blue screens with irql_not_less_or_equal , but after a few tries keep logging in it goes in and then i installed the vb tools. While updating it, it b/s couple of times with the memory_management issue but they all come from the ntoskrnl.exe. I have tried this on my m11x i have and it works fine but not on my custom PC. Its not the ram etc on the host has this is solid and no b/s etc and the b/s are only in the vm.

Has anyone got any ideas what the problem could be . ie doggy install of vb and vb itself some how?

Many thanks

I think I'm having the same problem as you, or at least a very similar one, and have spent much of the weekend trying to isolate it as well. I had a 64-bit Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machine that ran fine in VirtualBox 3.2.x, but after upgrading to 4.0 at the beginning of the year I consistently got blue screens when performing certain actions. I am now working with a completely new virtual machine created in VirtualBox 4.0.8 and that uses all of the defaults of the Windows2008_64 OS type and has a plain vanilla installation of 64-bit Windows Server 2008 R2 with Service Pack 1 (no additional applications or Windows components installed)...but am still having the exact same problems.

What happens is that when I do any of the following...

• Shut down or reboot the guest
• Connect to Windows' (not VirtualBox's) Remote Desktop server, then log out from the remote session
• Run Process Explorer, then exit it

...I get a blue screen.

The first one would happen with the old virtual machine every single time I tried to shut down or restart Windows. I'd go to shut down Windows and it would appear to go through the entire shut down sequence, but then it'd be back at the BIOS screen and boot back into Windows. The next time I'd log in, there'd be a message that a blue screen had occurred, even though I could never actually see the blue screen (even after disabling System Properties => Startup and Recovery => System failure => Automatically restart). The only way I could get the guest to power off was to initiate a shut down, let it blue screen and reset, then power off the guest at the BIOS screen. I do not remember what the stop code was (I do recall seeing IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL at some point but I can't say for sure), and I have not yet observed this behavior with the new virtual machine.

Logging out of a Remote Desktop session would cause the guest to reset or lock up every single time on the old virtual machine, and probably once every two or three times on the new one. I can't say what effect Process Explorer had on the old virtual machine, but on the new one if I just run Process Explorer with its default configuration and exit it without even doing anything then, again, once every two or three times it will cause a blue screen. With both logging out of Remote Desktop and exiting Process Explorer on the new virtual machine the stop code for the blue screen is 0x0000001a (MEMORY_MANAGEMENT).

I thought maybe I'd narrowed this apparent bug down to version 4.0.x of VirtualBox Guest Additions because I wasn't having problems after installing 3.2.12, but after playing with it some more I do get the same blue screens under the same conditions with 3.2.12. Then I thought maybe it was the Guest Additions in general, because after reverting back to a snapshot taken just after Windows installation and with no Guest Additions installed things seemed to be running better...but no, I've been able to reproduce the same blue screen with no Guest Additions at all.

I ran Memtest86+ overnight recently and it came back with no errors, so I don't think it's a hardware problem. I also had, at one time, a couple 64-bit Ubuntu Server guests running alongside the old Windows virtual machine and those didn't experience any issues like this. I'm tempted to revert back to VirtualBox 3.2 just to see if this problem goes away, but I've already had the 3.x to 4.x virtual machine directory format conversion trash three virtual machines of mine, and I'm not keen on going through that again in the event I can create a working, non-bluescreening 3.x Windows Server 2008 virtual machine. This does seem like a bug in 4.0, though I also tried analyzing one of the minidumps that were created and it, too, pointed to ntoskrnl.exe, so I don't know if that rules out VirtualBox as the culprit or not.

I just recreated the virtual machine from scratch with the following differences...

• 16 MB VRAM instead of 8 MB
• Two virtual SATA DVD driver instead of one

...and on the first three attempts to login Windows blue-screened with stop code 0x0000000A IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. The sequence of events was this:

1. Installed Windows. Automatic reboot.
2. At the login screen, Windows prompted to set the password. After setting the password, it started to login but instead blue-screened. Automatic reset.
3. At the login screen, entered the password and Windows started to login but instead blue-screened. Automatic reset.
4. At the login screen, entered the password and Windows started to login but instead blue-screened. Automatic reset.
5. At the login screen, entered the password and Windows finally logged in without blue-screening.

devx, by any chance is your processor an Athlon64 X2? In searching for the IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL stop code as it relates to VirtualBox I found a handful of people with that same processor, and that's what I have, too.

After reverting my settings to a single virtual SATA optical drive and 8 MB VRAM the blue screening immediately at login as described in my previous post has stopped.

I have opened ticket #9110 for the other blue screens I am experiencing.

I commented on ticket #9110, but I also wanted to comment here and note that I'm having frequent MEMORY_MANAGEMENT errors on a Windows 7 64bit guest running on a CentOS 6 64bit host. I'm running purely headless, everything is done via VRDP and command line. I'd be glad to help troubleshoot this.