virtualbox.org

I've got a guest Fedora 18 32bit system which freezes for 1.5 minutes during boot between displaying "loading GRUB" and showing actual GRUB menu if the "Enable VT-x" option is disabled. I include the virtual machine log. The freeze occurs between 00:00:03 and 00:01:26.

I've tried changing filesystem type of the virtual drive partitions from ext4 to ext3 (as it seems to hang on "Booting from hard disk"), turning off network adapter (in case the bootloader wants to boot from network) and adding the "divider=10" option to the guest kernel.

I don't have these problems with other VMs (Fedora 14, Debian 6 and 7, Windows XP, Windows 7) while the problem persists across different host systems (Debian 6, Debian 7, Fedora 19, all of them 64 bit) and different VirtualBox versions (4.2.18r88780, 4.2.20r90983).

What else should I try?

Why would you want to disable VT-x? Doing so will force a huge overhead because VBox has all but stopped support for software virtualization (no VT-x).

I didn't say I wanted to disable it. The CPU on hosts doesn't support virtualization.

I'd love to resolve the problem by upgrading hardware but I won't get money anytime soon. And, as suggestion of changing company policy from using VMs with "recent Fedora" to something else would spark at least a month-long discussion, I was looking for a way to make it work.

Sorry for misunderstanding, but the last part of my previous message tells you why. Nothing can be done at this point and believe me I asked over and over for software virtualization to continue but was told that the expense is just too high for a diminishing platform.