Cannot change resolution from 640x480 on WinXP guest

[clawhammer]

I have been googling both the web and these forums for this issue for the past hour and have not found any answers to this problem.

Environment:
Mac OS X 10.7.5 host, VirtualBox 4.2.16.
Windows XP client,

Description:
One day I tried different video modes, such as full screen, auto-resize, etc on my Windows XP guest. The next time I tried to boot my VM it dropped my resolution to 640x480 with 16 colors. I can select many other options but whenever I click 'Apply' the resolution does not change and the settings revert to 640x480. If I uninstall the VirtualBox video driver I can get 1024x768x32bit, but it does not provide the performance I need.

Attempted fixes:
Uninstalled/reinstalled Guest Additions, in both normal mode and safe mode
Used the command "VBoxManage setextradata global GUI/MaxGuestResolution any" to try to allow other resolutions
Updated to latest VirtualBox release (4.2.16)
Rebooting while in various View configurations (Full Screen, Scale, etc)
Changed Video Memory size
Enabled/Disabled video acceleration
Enabled/Disabled Nested Paging

Log info:
The following showed up in my vbox log when I tried to change the resolution:

Code: Select all

00:00:45.938323 Display::handleDisplayResize(): uScreenId = 0, pvVRAM=0000000000000000 w=720 h=400 bpp=0 cbLine=0x0, flags=0x1
00:00:45.976232 Display::handleDisplayResize(): uScreenId = 0, pvVRAM=0000000112a82000 w=640 h=480 bpp=0 cbLine=0x140, flags=0x1

The rest of the log showing this attempted resize has been attached.

Thanks for your time.

[Perryg]

From the hosts terminal/command window type VBoxManage showvminfo <VM Name> --details and post here. Replace <VM Name> with the actual name of the VM. Use " " if the name has a space in it.

Note if the host is Windows you need to be in the directory that has VBoxManage.exe for the command to work.

[clawhammer]

Here is the output:

Code: Select all

Name:            WinXP
Groups:          /
Guest OS:        Windows XP
UUID:            45414dba-9d5b-4a3e-b059-9f326d383a8d
Config file:     /Users/clawhammer/VirtualBox VMs/WinXP/WinXP.vbox
Snapshot folder: /Users/clawhammer/VirtualBox VMs/WinXP/Snapshots
Log folder:      /Users/clawhammer/VirtualBox VMs/WinXP/Logs
Hardware UUID:   45414dba-9d5b-4a3e-b059-9f326d383a8d
Memory size:     2048MB
Page Fusion:     off
VRAM size:       128MB
CPU exec cap:    100%
HPET:            off
Chipset:         piix3
Firmware:        BIOS
Number of CPUs:  1
Synthetic Cpu:   off
CPUID overrides: None
Boot menu mode:  message and menu
Boot Device (1): Floppy
Boot Device (2): DVD
Boot Device (3): HardDisk
Boot Device (4): Not Assigned
ACPI:            on
IOAPIC:          off
PAE:             off
Time offset:     0ms
RTC:             local time
Hardw. virt.ext: on
Hardw. virt.ext exclusive: off
Nested Paging:   on
Large Pages:     on
VT-x VPID:       on
State:           powered off (since 2013-08-22T00:46:34.951000000)
Monitor count:   1
3D Acceleration: on
2D Video Acceleration: on
Teleporter Enabled: off
Teleporter Port: 0
Teleporter Address: 
Teleporter Password: 
Tracing Enabled: off
Allow Tracing to Access VM: off
Tracing Configuration: 
Autostart Enabled: off
Autostart Delay: 0
Storage Controller Name (0):            IDE Controller
Storage Controller Type (0):            PIIX4
Storage Controller Instance Number (0): 0
Storage Controller Max Port Count (0):  2
Storage Controller Port Count (0):      2
Storage Controller Bootable (0):        on
IDE Controller (0, 0): /Users/clawhammer/VirtualBox VMs/WinXP/WinXP.vdi (UUID: 142da688-ee09-4250-9a61-979112fe87e7)
IDE Controller (1, 0): /Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso (UUID: fb13811b-5118-46ae-807b-0b4b17e16d76)
NIC 1:           disabled
NIC 2:           disabled
NIC 3:           disabled
NIC 4:           disabled
NIC 5:           disabled
NIC 6:           disabled
NIC 7:           disabled
NIC 8:           disabled
Pointing Device: USB Tablet
Keyboard Device: PS/2 Keyboard
UART 1:          disabled
UART 2:          disabled
LPT 1:           disabled
LPT 2:           disabled
Audio:           enabled (Driver: CoreAudio, Controller: AC97)
Clipboard Mode:  Bidirectional
Drag'n'drop Mode:  disabled
VRDE:            disabled
USB:             enabled
EHCI:            disabled

USB Device Filters:

<none>

Available remote USB devices:

<none>

Currently Attached USB Devices:

<none>

Bandwidth groups:  <none>

Shared folders:  

Name: 'Downloads', Host path: '/Users/clawhammer/Downloads' (machine mapping), writable

VRDE Connection:    not active
Clients so far:     0

Guest:

Configured memory balloon size:      0 MB

Edit: I failed to mention in my first post that this is not the first time this has happened to a windows XP VM- I had one do the same thing to me when playing full-screen Age of Empires 2. My solution then was to just delete and re-create the VM; on this one I would rather figure out what's going on.

[Perryg]

The logs or settings file don't show an issue as far as VirtualBox is concerned. Make sure you are not in scaled mode and if that does not fix the issue then post the guests control file (as a compressed attachment) <Guest>.vbox

[clawhammer]

Sorry for the delay, I was moving apartments. I assume by compressed you mean as a .zip file, so I have attached it to this post.

In looking through the file, I saw the <ExtraData> section contained a lot of display-relevant info. After backing up the original file I deleted everything within that section, booted the guest, uninstalled the guest additions, rebooted, re-installed the guest additions, rebooted, tried and failed to change the resolution again, and shut down the machine. On the reboot after uninstalling the guest additions there was nothing in the <ExtraData> section, but after installing the additions it added the exact same info to that section that was there before. This is curious because the "GUI/LastGuestSizeHintWasFullscreen" value="true" entry was set to true even though I had not done fullscreen since I had deleted the entries within <ExtraData> (I did not delete the <ExtraData> tags, just the content within such that I had <ExtraData> and then on the next line </ExtraData>).

Thanks for your help.

[Perryg]

You really shouldn't be editing this file. I assume this is the edited one, do you have the original I can see?
From what I see at the moment there are a few required lines missing.

[clawhammer]

I uploaded the original file before I did any edits. I'm curious- what lines are missing?

[Perryg]

Here is my XP extradata section

Code: Select all

<ExtraData>
      <ExtraDataItem name="CustomVideoMode1" value="1440x900x32"/>
      <ExtraDataItem name="GUI/Fullscreen" value="on"/>
      <ExtraDataItem name="GUI/InfoDlgState" value="400,450,normal"/>
      <ExtraDataItem name="GUI/LastCloseAction" value="SaveState"/>
      <ExtraDataItem name="GUI/LastGuestSizeHint" value="1087,814"/>
      <ExtraDataItem name="GUI/LastGuestSizeHint1" value="1024,768"/>
      <ExtraDataItem name="GUI/LastGuestSizeHintWasFullscreen" value="true"/>
      <ExtraDataItem name="GUI/LastNormalWindowPosition" value="2052,82,1087,839"/>
      <ExtraDataItem name="GUI/LastNormalWindowPosition1" value="1992,36,1024,788"/>
      <ExtraDataItem name="GUI/LastScaleWindowPosition" value="2189,190,640,480"/>
      <ExtraDataItem name="GUI/MiniToolBarAlignment" value="top"/>
      <ExtraDataItem name="GUI/SaveMountedAtRuntime" value="yes"/>
      <ExtraDataItem name="GUI/ShowMiniToolBar" value="yes"/>
    </ExtraData>

[clawhammer]

Thanks for sharing that. Something tells me this is not related to the .vbox file; I made sure to close VirtualBox, deleted all of my ExtraData tags, and then opened VirtualBox and started the VM. It started in Auto-Resize mode, which tells me it noticed the changes to the file (as the original file had Auto-Resize set to false); however, I still could not change the resolution. A search through the guest's registry for "640" showed nothing of interest, so it doesn't seem to be storing any resolution info in the registry. I also tried renaming ~/Library/VirtualBox to VirtualBoxOld and then re-launched VirtualBox. This caused it to recreate ~/Library/VirtualBox. I then had to re-add my virtual machine. However, this did not have any change either. Thus it doesn't seem to be the installation settings or the individual guest's settings. My next guess is that the directory or permissions are somehow borked; I am going to try cloning the machine via VirtualBox to see if that does anything.