I am using the latest vbox 2.2.2 . My host is Vista x64 SP2 (SP2, RTM).
I have tried several x64 guest OSes.
- Opensolaris 2008.11 . It won't boot in 64-bit mode from the boot CD. It results in an OSOL kernel panic. It does boot in 32-bit mode if I disable AMD-V in vbox.
- Windows 7 release candidate . It gets stuck at "starting windows" when booting the install DVD.
The host machine where I'm seeing this has an AMD Phenom X4 9750 CPU. This is the 2.4 GHz 95W version (low-power). The motherboard is XFX 750a with nVidia 750a chipset. I have "secure virtual machine" enabled in the BIOS - if I disable it, virtual box complains when trying to run 64-bit guests. I have 8 GB DDR2 800 RAM.
I am pretty sure this is a problem in virtual box related to the AMD CPU, maybe with AMD-V.
I have another machine which is intel based (AMD Q6600), also running Vista x64 SP2, also with 8 GB of RAM, with Intel P35 chipset. On that host, both of the above x64 OS'es boot fine as virtualbox guests. In fact I first ran into the problem when copying the hard drive VDI files from the Intel host machine to the AMD host machine, and they didn't work on the later. Then I tried with the install images for these OSes, and they didn't work either on the AMD-based host.