Installs on 64 bit Mac OS X as 32 bit

[interneter]

I'm installed Virtual Box on my mac book pro (mountain lion) which is a 64 bit intel system. I then installed a guest Windows 7 Home Premium which should install as either 64 or 32 whichever is available. When I look at the Virtual Box settings its got a 32 bit chip emulator.

Is there a way I can get Virtual Box to be 64 bit?

Thanks

[michaln]

I then installed a guest Windows 7 Home Premium which should install as either 64 or 32 whichever is available.

Are you sure? What was the ISO you installed from called?

When I look at the Virtual Box settings its got a 32 bit chip emulator.

It doesn't have any CPU emulator. 64-bit guests can be used if all the prerequisites spelled out in the manual are fulfilled (a 64-bit CPU with functioning hardware virtualization, basically).

Is there a way I can get Virtual Box to be 64 bit?

The only thing that can be said with 100% certainty is that others can.

[mpack]

I had the opposite problem a while back: I bought a retail copy of Win7, believing the rumours that it supported both 32bit and 64bit on the same disk. In fact it was 64bit only. Not what I wanted, but I still installed it and it worked fine under VBox.

[interneter]

the download was VirtualBox-4.2.0-80737-OSX.dmg on Sept 17th

it seems to have defaulted to chipset PIIX3 when I' reading ICH9 is better for OS X systems

[interneter]

I think the problem was I didn't realize that Windows was not the right choice in settings prior to the install. There is also a Windows64 choice.

[mpack]

You think? Have you actually tried this solution? The Windows or Windows64 choice selects different templates for the VM hardware recipe, it doesn't change the fundamental character of the CPU or the guest OS. Now true the wrong template may disable some necessary features (e.g. VT-x) which a 64bit kernel would require, but I'd have expected that to cause an error message, not a different kernel in the guest.