Windows Guest on Hardy Host, 4-bit color at 640x480

croldham · Post by **croldham** » 22. Sep 2008, 17:16

Greetings,

I have a Windows XP guest on a Hardy Heron host. The Windows video driver is extremely badly behaved wrt allowable resolutions and color depths. When I started the default VGA driver worked (gave me 256 colors at 800x600), then after I installed the vbox driver, the Windows video would stay stuck at 640x480x4 bit color and would not allow me to pick a higher resolution or color depth. If I uninstall and reinstall the vbox driver, it works OK until the next time I reboot the VM, then it wants to stay stuck in 4-bit color mode.

The frustrating thing is that it worked OK when I first installed the VM, it was only after I rebooted the VM that the video got stuck at the low resolution/color depth.

Is this a known issue? Is there a resolution?

Thanks!

--cro

Post by **TerryE** » 22. Sep 2008, 17:25

What video memory do you have allocated? All the VEGA modes plus smart sizing / Seamless Windows work fine for me with Guest Additions on my Ubuntu Hardy system.

croldham · Post by **croldham** » 22. Sep 2008, 17:37

TerryE wrote:What video memory do you have allocated? All the VEGA modes plus smart sizing / Seamless Windows work fine for me with Guest Additions on my Ubuntu Hardy system.

The VM was created with the default 4 MB. I turned it up to 64 MB, then down to 32 MB with no change in behavior.

Thanks for the reply!

--cro

Post by **TerryE** » 22. Sep 2008, 18:27

Was this a fresh install or a migrated one? I am just wondering if you have any other video components lingering on your system which is messing this up?

croldham · Post by **croldham** » 22. Sep 2008, 18:33

TerryE wrote:Was this a fresh install or a migrated one? I am just wondering if you have any other video components lingering on your system which is messing this up?

It was completely fresh. I did start with 1.6 from the Debian-based repositories, and then upgraded to 2.0.2 when I realized that apt didn't pull the latest.

Post by **Sasquatch** » 22. Sep 2008, 21:26

Do you by chance run it on an Asus EEE Laptop? If so, it's known to give bad graphics to a VM, the video card of the EEE laptop can't handle it, too low on video memory and when a VM asks for some memory from the card, it gives only a bit.

croldham · Post by **croldham** » 22. Sep 2008, 21:38

Sasquatch wrote:Do you by chance run it on an Asus EEE Laptop?

No, its an Asus a7n-266vm-based board with the onboard video, which is nVidia based, but uses shared ram. I turned up the shared ram to 64 MB in the BIOS.

virtualbox.org

Windows Guest on Hardy Host, 4-bit color at 640x480

Windows Guest on Hardy Host, 4-bit color at 640x480

Low bit color on Windows Guest