virtualbox.org

Hello,

I wanted to ask a question. I use VirtualBox 6.1 on a laptop i7-9750H and it does work most of the time pretty well. I have set up a pentesting environment with Linux and windows machines. Except for win7 that wont install, its all working pretty well.
Yet at times and I suspect the reason to be windows updates on the host, the lab breaks and starting any client-OS ends up with a "VT-x not enabled" error. It is ofc enabled in the BIOS and though there is a green check mark next to the windows kernel isolation option in the menu, the cache intgrity check is set to off. Hyper-V is disabled, as well as the windows feature: support for virtualized platforms.

So I am a bit out of options here. It happend two times now, the error showed up, after a windows update. Do you maybe have an idea what features could be reset upon this update or where else I have to look?

Thank you in advance,
Greetings
~ent

We don't have your PC in front of us, so I'm afraid that debugging your problem is not practical. All you can do is read the related FAQ (especially posts #2 and later) and make sure that none of the offending Windows services are enabled.

thanks, the list of services affected, helped. I disabled most of the services and nothing helped at first. Last thing I disabled was WSL, subsystem for Linux, after that VB started working again. After reenabling WSL it is still working, so prolly after windows updates there maybe a service involved here, using VT-x.

Thanks for your help

The original WSL was not a VM, however WSL2 is. If you have the latter, and it still works then it's likely your VirtualBox problem will return.

mpack wrote:The original WSL was not a VM, however WSL2 is. If you have the latter, and it still works then it's likely your VirtualBox problem will return.

yes good to know thanks.
The services list helped tho, didnt know what else was interfering with VT-x.

I am not so good with windows and tend to fall back to WSL2 if I get homesick

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYqXNzMz0TY