Blue Screen...HELP

[Devonshire]

Hi, please can some one please help me with my current problem of continuously having VirtualBox crashing with Blu Screen on all 3 of our Macs in our small, winy office. Please see screen shot, will send on Log in a minute. Ever since I upgraded the Macs to the latest version of VirtualBox (4.3.6) I have had the blue screen problem. My Mac which is the server is running OS 10.6.8 and Windows 7 Ultimate 64. The other two Macs are Mac Mini's which are also running Windows 7 but am not sure which OS they are on (if requested I can post). If there is any other info, I will try and do my best, all your help in helping resolve this current problem will be very greatly received (playing havoc in office, love macs but our accounts programme is Win based, bummer). Thank you

[Devonshire]

Hello, as promised here is the Log, thank you for helping.

[ChipMcK]

google search windows 7 reference_by_pointer

[mpack]

That log is incomplete - I assume it was grabbed while the VM was still running. Please replace it with a complete log, and this time make sure the log is compressed (e.g. zipped).

I notice that you don't have a whole lot of available memory on this (32bit) host. Not an ideal platform for a Win7-64 guest.

[msuwill1082]

Hi Devonshire - I too am having this exact problem since upgrading to Virtualbox 4.3. I have a Windows 7 64 bit guest running on Mac OS 10.6.8 server as host. My host system does have a lot of RAM so I don't think RAM is the issue. I have a Mac Pro with 32 GB of RAM and only have 3 GB assigned to the Windows 7 guest. It ran fine under Virtualbox 4.2, but after upgrading to 4.3 (4.3.12 r93733 to be exact) I have had repeated BSODs, typically with the REFERENCE_BY_POINTER error but also occasionally with a SYSTEM_SERVICE_ERROR exception. The crashes happen even if I do not log in but just let the guest boot up and sit for a few minutes. It cannot stay running for more than 5 minutes without a BSOD and thus is no longer usable. I hope we can get a fix for this. In the meantime I am reverting the host back to 4.2 to see if the issue is resolved and will post my results in a while.

[loukingjr]

for what it's worth I've been running both Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 as guests for quite a long time (in the case of 7) and have never had a BSOD. All the way up through 4.3.12.

[msuwill1082]

Ok, I went back to Virtualbox 4.2.24 (the final release in the 4.2 series) and my Win 7 64 bit guest is running fine again. 2 hours without a BSOD or reboot. Something changed apparently between the 4.2.x and 4.3.x versions of Virtualbox which makes the guest behave more erratically on a Mac OS X 10.6.8 host. If you can roll back to that version you will probably be ok. In the meantime, I am hoping that the issue gets fixed in the 4.3.x version at some point because the Mac Pro I have cannot be upgraded to Mountain Lion or Mavericks. I might be locked in at this point with 4.2.24.

[rpmurray]

You might want to post this on the public bugtracker, it has a better chance of being looked at by a developer there.

The devs made a change in VB starting with 4.3.8 that works on improving the emulation of certain MSR registers on certain host CPUs. My guess, and it's only a guess, is that there are certain edge cases that trigger a crash. If you're adventuresome you might try installing 4.3.6 to see if the last version before they made those changes works for you. I'd recommend making a backup of your VMs before testing this just in case.

[ChipMcK]

in Mavericks, Apple slammed shut deprecated /Library/StartupItems folder and VirtualBox has been using the folder.

To get from V4.2.x to V4.3.x, recommend the following:

1. Using the CD/DVD ISO image used to install/upgrade V4.2.x, select the Uninstall Tool; this will clear out /Library/StartupItems folder.
2. Use a CD/DVD ISO image, preferably v4,3.8. or above, to install VirtualBox v4.3.x, thereby properly setting up org.virtualbox.startup.plist, symbolic link, etc.