virtualbox.org

I attempted to reinstall guest additions. The guest additions installer wanted to overwrite my current video driver (3-D). I stopped it by choosing to not allow the unsigned driver to be installed, but that aborted the whole guest additions re-installation. Why? It would be nice if the guest additions installer allowed a user to skip the re-installation of selected drivers, especially the driver (3-D) that can only be installed in Safe Mode.

What 3D driver are you talking about? The only 3D driver that will work in a guest is the VirtualBox one.

mpack wrote:What 3D driver are you talking about? The only 3D driver that will work in a guest is the VirtualBox one.

That's the one to which I referred. It's an experimental display driver. It can only be installed in Safe Mode. That's fine, but if I try to re-install Guest Additions I don't have any option to skip overwriting the existing display driver so, if I'm not currently in Safe Mode, it gets overwritten. I then have to reboot in Safe Mode and re-install the Guest Additions again.

It's just a matter of convention. I'd like to see more control over the Guest Additions (re-)installation. I'm not proposing an old, Linux-style series of questions (Do you want to install this? Do you want to install that? Do you want to install the other? Etc., where this, that, and the other are a bunch of drivers and utilities about which the user is not familiar and can't possibly answer questions). What I'm proposing is that, if the Guest Additions installer detects that it's re-installing rather than installing for the first time, it asks.

Oh, never mind....
I'll just have to remember to boot to Safe Mode before re-installing Guest Additions.

You can install in normal mode and even select to install the 3D drivers (not talking about the wddm drivers which do not need to be in safe mode to install anyway). The reason that you can is because the normal mode install will not replace or overwrite the safe mode files. It can't.
Now if you are talking about installing a new version then you really should install in safe mode as the drivers may have been updated.

Thank you, Perry. I didn't know that. Of course, that changes everything. Warmest Regards - Mark.