MEPIS Community Forum

Upgraded to Vbox 2.10. My install of Win XP now loads and gets to the point of rendering the start bar and freezes. I will wander over to the Vbox forum and see if this has been reported, but anyone here experiencing difficulties?

Nope.

I did have a slight difficulty in setting up VB 2.1.0 because I had to uninstall the previous version beforehand; I never had to do that before. I also had to reinstall Guest Additions after I got my former WinXP guest up and running. But besides those two minor annoyances, all I had to do is point VB to where my previous WinXP guest .vdi file was, and everything just worked.

I must say how very happy I am with VB 2.1.0. The one thing that never worked for me on previous versions was the Win Hot Key that releases the keyboard/mouse from the guest machine before Guest Additions is installed. This meant that when I was installing a new OS and used the keyboard/mouse to set up the new OS, I couldn't release the keyboard or mouse again in order to install Guest Additions. That meant I had to reboot MEPIS while VM was running in order to get my mouse/keyboard back, and then install Guest Additions -- what a PITA that was. With VB 2.1.0, the Hot Key works as advertised.

no problem here either... sorry I can't help, I wonder if it's VirtualBox only problem or XP has part of the guilt too, knowing Windows I wouldn't rule that out.

The Vbox forum has some discussions of freezes but mostly with MACS. I rolled back to 2.06 and had a similar problem, but this time more severe. I fear sometime, somehow the XP vdi file got corrupted. Of course I had a backup that got accidently erased when I was messing with trying to get a USB flash drive bootable. So the only solution is to reinstall XP, arrghh.

Thanks for the comments.

can you try to press F8 or it doesn't go that far? If it does, try the "safe mode"

Yes I can get to the safe mode. What happens is; error messages flash by that are unreadable due to speed, and it ends back at the safe mode menu. The Vbox log file gives no clue.

If you can't start in safe mode it is messed up seriously. Maybe... but I doubt it would work you could try to downgrade VBox and try again but as far as I know the format of the vdi has changed so you could probably not go back (it's worth a try -- make a backup before)

I did try a downgrade. no help. and bumped back up with same result. I am pretty sure the vdi is toast. lesson learned. multiple backups. One is not enough.

I dont know if it will work in a VM but in a normal windows world you could try a scandisk from a xp cd or if that doesnt work then a windows repair from the cd. It would keep you from having to reload the whole VM and reinstall programs.

Thanks I will give it a try and report back.