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Guru meditation on Win XP virtual machine

Posted: 22. Feb 2017, 13:19
by CarloDella
I previously tried several times to find a solution to this problem, searching on forums, but with no results.
I am not expert in virtualmachine and i am sorry for my english, that is not very good.

I had a Win XP machine running on a Xubuntu 14.04 host. When i upgraded to Xubuntu 16.04 the machine stopped working. Precisely during the boot it passed tu Guru meditation.
I was only able to run the machine in safe mode, with a low resolution, so i decided to reinstall the machine, also because i had too few disk space in the machine.

The installation went fine. But i had some errors during the installation of antivirus (with the machine still working). I tried first Avira. Afterwards i tried with Avast and here started the problems. I realized that Avira didn't uninstall properly, so in the tray icon i saw both Avira and Avast Icons...in that moment the machine went in Guru meditation.
I restart the machine and quickly with task manager i terminated avira and Avast process. Then I restored a previously state of XP and tried to install Avast. During the installation again VM went to Guru.

I attached the log file, splitted in three parts.

Please, someone can give me a little help? Or only a hint to solve?

Thank you

VBox 1-3.log
(109.96 KiB) Downloaded 26 times
VBox 2-3.log
(105.26 KiB) Downloaded 14 times
VBox 3-3.log
(89.74 KiB) Downloaded 15 times

Re: Guru meditation on Win XP virtual machine

Posted: 23. Feb 2017, 08:45
by socratis
I don't use 3rd party antivirus on my XP VMs, so my experience is from what I've gathered from other posts. The latest and greatest antivirus programs want to use VT-x (hardware acceleration) on the guest, because most of today's computers have it available. On a VM, VT-x is not available. We've seen several reports of these antivirus causing all sorts of problems, both in the hosts and in the guests.

My advice? Stick with MS's Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE), which is the older brother of Windows Defender. I couldn't find the official link in MS's site (deleted?), but if you search for "mseinstall.exe XP" you can find several reputable places to download it from.

NOTE: Despite XP not being updated anymore, the antivirus definitions for MSE are being updated!

Re: Guru meditation on Win XP virtual machine

Posted: 24. Feb 2017, 15:43
by CarloDella
Thank you very much!!
I saw something in the log about this VT-x and i tried to understand the meaning, that now is more clear.
However in the meanwhile i tried another antivirus, AVG, and it seems to work.
But i think that i'll try windows security essentials, as you suggest.