Windows 7 Domain client crashes hard

[Adalis]

Hardware is an ASUS G73Jw, i7, 8GB, 240GB SSD (sda1), WD 500GB (sdb1), br/dvd/cd, nvidia gt 460m

Windows 7 Pro Guest on Ubuntu 12.10, Virtualbox 4.2 with extensions and guest add-ons. Guest is setup with 5139MB, 4 processors, VHD file created with Disk2VHD from sysinternals, VHD resides on sdb1 which is automounted through /media/Data (Data is name of drive volume)

Everything works OK except locking the desktop or sending "Host+Del" crashes the guest hard.

When first setting up the guest I opened msconfig and deselected everything except msinstall, rebooted and removed any direct hardware access drivers or programs, e.g.; nvidia drivers, intel turbo monitor, ASUS camera drivers, etc. The many error messages I was getting went away.

Can anyone tell me why I am crashing on normal key functions like host+del from a running guest? Couldn't even find this listed in any of the forums.

Appreciate your insights.

[mpack]

"Crashes the guest hard" is not a useful diagnostic description. A precise but plain English description and/or screenshot showing the error would be better, that is in addition to the VM log file, the latter posted as a zipped attachment. The VM log file is called "VBox.log", and can be found in the "Logs" subfolder of your VM folder.

[Adalis]

Mpack,

Thank you for your response.

Crashing hard denotes a sudden freeze of the system. There is no error message. The only way to get the guest down is to "close" the system, in effect powering down. Once done, attempts at rebooting the guest result in instability and secondary freeze at the "Windows is starting up" screen. The solution is to reboot Ubuntu.

I am not sure what to look for in the log files. The very last entries state changing from DESTROYING to TERMINATE. There is an ACCESSDENIED entry after that.

I am wondering if this is occurring because this is a domain client and the laptop is not always connected to the domain to authenticate?

I am going to try and demote the guest to WORKGROUP and see if this doesn't stabilize the issue.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions of what to look for in the log file.

Adalis

[mpack]

Crashing hard denotes a sudden freeze of the system.

Um... no it doesn't. A sudden freeze of the system is called a hang, a lockup - or you could also call it a freeze. A crash means that the application terminated suddenly at an unintended moment (think car crash), with or without an error message. There is no meaning to "crashes hard" that I'm aware of, but then again I've only been a computer programmer for 30-odd years so who knows.

Next time you get an apparant hang you could try popping up the guest task list (see "Machine|Insert Ctrl-Alt-Del" menu item), and see what is taking all the CPU time. I agree that the log is probably a waste of time in this case because I suspect that the problem will be a task running inside the guest, rather than a problem with VirtualBox.

[Adalis]

Well mpack, despite our disagreement over the vernacular...

I demoted the guest to a workgroup member and the issue has disappeared. My guess is that the guest, being resident on a laptop that is not always connected to the domain network, went looking for authentication verification, couldn't find it and "crashed hard"...or froze.

In any case the issue is resolved. I just wonder about the potential challenges of using virtualization in a production domain with large numbers of users...? Thoughts?

[BillG]

What makes you think that it has anything to do with virtualization? The same thing can happen if the DC is on hard metal. It is an Active Directory thing, not a virtualization thing. If it can't find a DC to logon, there is a good chance that it will hang if it is domain joined. The question you should be asking is "is it a good idea to join laptops to a domain" (and you should be asking it in a Windows forum).