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I am trying to configure a modem for a Win XP guest hosted by a Win 7 machine. I am looking at [My VM]/Settings/Serial Ports. I have determined my modem is on IRQ 9. However, where do I find a five character I/O port from the Win XP guest? When I visit XP's 'System Information" page, open up Hardware Resources/IO, I get lengthy addresses, not the 5 characters that the VM is looking for. (For example, "System Info" will give me 0x00002EB 0x00002EF; which is more than 5 characters. TIA.

You have a dialup modem on a host RS232 port in this day and age?

Anyway, put the VM IRQ and base address settings back where they were - you have not understood them. These have nothing to do with the settings of your host.

The only thing you need to do is enable the port, and set the Port/File path your serial port's device name, i.e. the port your modem is attached to e.g. "COM4:".

Thanks for the reply. I will report back with my progress.

BTW, dialup modems are still pretty useful. You can send faxes and connect to Internet when your main connection is down. I know that there are email-to-fax services, but they usually cost $$$. Thanks.

On the relevance of the IRQ and base address settings, you might want to read this message. It is discussing LPT ports rather than serial, but the principles are the same. You should leave serial port 1 configured with IRQ4, base address 0x3F8. This will always be detected as virtual COM1 inside the guest, regardless of how it's named on the host. And the name on the host is what you put in the "Port/File Path" box. Don't forget the colon (:).

Thanks for the replies, mpack. I got a BSOD last night when trying to gather info from the virtual XP machine. This BSOD caused my PC to do a lengthy system restore, and when it was over I lost my enthusiasm for the project. I think that XP is just poison even if it is used virtually. I am looking into alternatives. So, I thank you again for the help, but I will need to find another guest OS.

VMSteve wrote:I think that XP is just poison even if it is used virtually.

I find the opposite to be true. It's the most mature extant NT variant around, hence the most stable - and the fastest and least memory hungry on like for like hardware.

A BSOD in a VM is usually caused by user error, and that user isn't magically going to become less error prone with a different guest OS. This rather sounds like a workman blaming his tools.

But, it's also true that any attempt to use a virtual machine to control physical hardware... often ends in tears. That just isn't what a VM is for.

Edit:  Also, a BSOD causes a reset, but I can't see why it would cause a system restore. All it should cause is for you to write down the BSOD stopcode, and use that clue to fix whatever the problem was. Also I'm not clear: was this BSOD in the host or the guest? Severe information shortage here.

The BSOD came from the host machine. In the guest machine I was just scrolling around the "System Information" page when I got the BSOD. No doubt my host machine is the culprit, but I haven't tried to troubleshoot the issue. I guess I exaggerated by calling XP "poison." I put Ubuntu on the PC last night and I may experiment with having it as the host OS and XP as the guest. Thanks for the replies.

Sorry, I don't know what "System Information" page you're referring to. If the host OS crashes then that could be caused by many things, e.g. bad host RAM. Have you run a memory check? It could also simply mean that you overcommitted RAM to the guest, and the host ran out. No way to tell without a representative VM log file.

MPack, thanks for the information. I will pursue looking over the log as well as doing a memory check. When I wrote "System Information" this means that within my Guest XP box, I went to Accessories/System Tools/System Information and was just looking over the various hardware settings when BSOD arrived. It will be interesting to find out what the VM crash log says happened. thanks again for all the help.

VMSteve wrote:When I wrote "System Information" this means that within my Guest XP box, I went to Accessories/System Tools/System Information and was just looking over the various hardware settings when BSOD arrived

And it was a host BSOD? All of the information you see inside the guest should be describing virtual hardware. No real hardware accesses are involved, so it's hard to see why this would produce a BSOD. It's possible that it tried some funny hardware trick that VirtualBox doesn't support.

Do you have VT-x available? Does the crash still happen with VT-x available? (I could answer these questions for you if you provided a log).