Guets Additions - Black screen - Win8 host and guest

[mightymidget]

Hi all,

Hope someone can help. For sometime I've been happily using Windows-7 as a host, running numerous Windows-8 guests (32/64). All of which have been working perfectly with older version of VBox and recently with the latest release including Guest Additions 4.2.6.

A few days ago I've upgraded my host to Windows 8 Pro which has caused a problem. I can install Win-8 guests which work fine until I install guest additions 4.2.6, then all I get is a black screen. I can see from the activity that the VM is still running, but I get no display output. If I reboot the VM I get the windows logo then when it hands over to the graphics driver I get the black screen again.

Very strange behaviour considering all that's changed is the operating system that my VMs are hosted on. All of the hardware is unchanged, and the upgrade went well. I've tried uninstalling then re-installing V-box thinking that something might have got corrupted but with no joy. Tried a number of Win-8 guest all of which show the same fault when GA is installed. Very frustrating to say the least.

Anyone else having this problem? Be grateful for any advice. Thanks Andy.

[noteirak]

Did you reinstall your host or upgrade from Windows 8?
If you upgraded and kept all your apps, etc, you might have to reinstall Virtualbox to fix any incompatibility from the upgrade.

[mightymidget]

Did you reinstall your host or upgrade from Windows 8?
If you upgraded and kept all your apps, etc, you might have to reinstall Virtualbox to fix any incompatibility from the upgrade.

Thank you for your quick reply. I upgraded the host from Win-7 to Win-8 keeping all my old applications including V-box. When I noticed the problem I reinstalled V-Box which had no effect on the problem.

I have however just managed to fix it. Here's what caused it just in case anyone else has the same problem. Basically when you upgraded from 7 to 8 the upgrade assistant lies. It gives you a list of problems and a list of compatible apps. What it doesn't tell you is that Windows-8 will install older, out of date, drivers over the top of your current newer drivers. In addition to this it also appears to have removed a load of other drivers, all of which were signed by Microsoft and all of which were Win-8 compatible.

Some of these drivers were part of the latest AMD Catalyst graphics package that I'd been happily running in Win-7 before the upgrade. 8 removed a load and replaced what was left with old crap. As soon as I applied the latest 13.1 AMD Catalyst Suite the problem with Guest Addition/Black Screens has totally disappeared.

Guess the lesson here is make sure everything is up to date, and don't assume anything...