Win7 Vm does not start under Vbox 4.04. Crash does not release memory

[Francis Turner]

I have a 32 bit win 7 guest that will not start under VirtualBox 4.04 PUEL. It crashes after displaying the initial boot screen but before the animated windows logo would appear. I did install the USB extensions before attempting to start the VM. On a subsequent start windows offers to try and rebuild things but that too crashes at about the same place.

Furthermore once crashed, window commands to reset/ACPI Shutdown or close (i.e. HOST R etc.) do not work. They simply cause the window to fail to respond to further commands. It is possible subsequently to use the host linux window manager (XFCE) to force the closing of the window. However no matter what command is issued, while the VBox GUI claims the VM 'aborted', memory is not released even though a list of processes does not display the VM and the window has been closed by the host window manager.

This VM does start correctly up with VB 3.2.12 r68302.

A Windows XP VM and a Ubuntu VM do both start up correctly with 4.04

The host OS is 32 bit Xubuntu 10.04 (Linux 2.6.32-28-generic-pae #55-Ubuntu SMP Mon Jan 10 22:34:08 UTC 2011 i686 GNU/Linux )

Here are the Vm details while running in 3.2.12 which I have now downgraded back to

VBoxManage showvminfo Win7VM --details Oracle VM VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 3.2.12 (C) 2005-2010 Oracle Corporation All rights reserved.

Name: Win7VM Guest OS: Windows 7 UUID: 8868405c-2a22-41b3-97c6-2ac437cf7753 Config file: /home/francis/.VirtualBox/Machines/Win7VM/Win7VM.xml Hardware UUID: 8868405c-2a22-41b3-97c6-2ac437cf7753 Memory size: 1536MB Page Fusion: off VRAM size: 40MB HPET: off Number of CPUs: 2 Synthetic Cpu: off CPUID overrides: None Boot menu mode: message and menu Boot Device (1): DVD Boot Device (2): HardDisk Boot Device (3): Not Assigned Boot Device (4): Not Assigned ACPI: on IOAPIC: on PAE: on Time offset: 0 ms RTC: local time Hardw. virt.ext: on Hardw. virt.ext exclusive: on Nested Paging: on Large Pages: off VT-x VPID: on State: running (since 2011-02-23T10:34:15.472000000) Monitor count: 1 3D Acceleration: on 2D Video Acceleration: on Teleporter Enabled: off Teleporter Port: 0 Teleporter Address: Teleporter Password: Storage Controller Name (0): IDE Controller Storage Controller Type (0): PIIX4 Storage Controller Instance Number (0): 0 Storage Controller Max Port Count (0): 2 Storage Controller Port Count (0): 2 Storage Controller Name (1): SATA Controller Storage Controller Type (1): IntelAhci Storage Controller Instance Number (1): 0 Storage Controller Max Port Count (1): 30 Storage Controller Port Count (1): 1 IDE Controller (1, 0): Empty SATA Controller (0, 0): /home/francis/.VirtualBox/HardDisks/Win7VM.vdi (UUID: b7c893f8-ddfe-488f-a7b1-1dff7703dbe8) NIC 1: MAC: 080027287B19, Attachment: Bridged Interface 'eth0', Cable connected: on, Trace: off (file: none), Type: 82540EM, Reported speed: 0 Mbps, Boot priority: 0 NIC 2: MAC: 080027D0955F, Attachment: Bridged Interface 'wlan0', Cable connected: off, Trace: off (file: none), Type: 82540EM, Reported speed: 0 Mbps, Boot priority: 0 NIC 3: disabled NIC 4: disabled NIC 5: disabled NIC 6: disabled NIC 7: disabled NIC 8: disabled Pointing Device: PS/2 Mouse Keyboard Device: PS/2 Keyboard UART 1: disabled UART 2: disabled Audio: enabled (Driver: PulseAudio, Controller: AC97) Clipboard Mode: Bidirectional Video mode: 1760x949x32 VRDP: disabled USB: enabled

USB Device Filters:

Index: 0 Active: yes Name: Nokia 6600i slide [3616] VendorId: 0421 ProductId: 0296 Revision: 3616 Manufacturer: Nokia Product: Nokia 6600i slide Remote: no Serial Number:

Available remote USB devices:

<none>

Currently Attached USB Devices:

<none>

Shared folders:

Name: 'Dox', Host path: '/home/francis/Documents' (machine mapping), writable Name: 'ts', Host path: '/opt/ts' (machine mapping), writable Name: 'Pix', Host path: '/opt/d/www/Pix' (machine mapping), writable

VRDP Connection: not active Clients so far: 0

Guest:

OS type: Windows7 Additions active: yes Additions version: 65540

Configured memory balloon size: 0 MB

[Greg Hormann]

I just had a similar issue. Win7 32-bit guest would not start, would just "hang" before the animated windows logo. All disk activity in the Guest would stop. Repeated attempts all had the same issue. I then closed down another running VM and the problem guest would start fine. The two guest I was trying to run in parallel had 3GB allocated each. The host machine machine (Linux 2.6.32-30-generic #59-Ubuntu SMP x86_64 GNU/Linux) has 8GB of RAM. I'm wondering if RAM Fragmentation (or Starvation) wasn't part of the problem as that seems to be about the time that VirtualBox Fully allocated the requested ram.

[Francis Turner]

I don't think that is the entire issue as the same VM works fine in VBox 3.2.21 and the same problem occurs for me when I have an empty host machine.

[Francis Turner]

Same behavior under 4.06