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[SOLVED] Microsoft Whistler Build 2296 Graphics Issues

Posted: 9. Aug 2015, 08:53
by AlefDaltur
I have a Whistler (build 2296) guest running on VirtualBox 4.3.16, after finishing the installation I found that my mouse wasn't working so I was forced to attempt to install Guest Additions purely through hotkeys, only to find that VBoxGuestAdditions-x86.exe wouldn't start.
Searching through the interwebs I found that I actually had to create a file named VBoxGuestAdditions-x86.exe.manifest in the same folder as the file and fill it with

Code: Select all

<assembly manifestversion="1.0">
</assembly>
and after doing that installation went pretty much perfectly, I rebooted and was able to use my mouse, however even after the installation of Guest Additions for some reason the video adapter is stuck on VgaSave, Device Manager shows 'VirtualBox Graphics Adapter' under 'Display adapters' however its icon has a yellow exclamation mark on it which leads me to believe there's a problem with it but eventvwr shows no errors or relevant warnings.

The guest has 32mb of video memory and 256mb of memory allocated to it, along with 10gb of storage. It does not have 2d or 3d acceleration enabled however it does have VT-x/AMD-V and nested paging enabled.

What's happening and what can I do to fix it? Any help would be appreciated.

Edit: In the VirtualBox Graphics Adapter properties under 'Device status' it says
This device it not working properly because Windows cannot load the drivers required for this device (Code 31)

Click Troubleshooter to start the troubleshooter for this device.
The troubleshooter states
This device depends on another device that is not functioning correctly.
and appears to be a generic definition of Error 31.

Edit 2:
Success!

It appeared that the Guest Additions for XP, or any drivers for XP for that matter, are not compatible with Whistler, I managed to come across something called VBEMP (which I can't link to as I'm a new user, but a quick Google should come up with it).

Now Whistler does NOT have the ability to unzip .zip files, so what I did was grab the files vbemp.sys and vbemppnp.inf from /VBE30/W2K/PNP/ inside the ZIP and put it on my web server so that I could download it from IE inside Whistler, but any uploading service would have sufficed.

From there I had to install them, to do this I had to go to the device manager, right click on the VirtualBox Graphics Adapter and 'Update driver...', in the new window select the radio button 'Install from a list of specific location (Advanced)', click next, then select the radio button 'Don't search. I will choose the driver to install.', click next, then click on the button 'Have Disk', then in the new window click on 'Browse' and then select vbemppnp.inf (make sure that vbemp.sys is in the same folder). After it had finished installing restart and it should work correctly.