Installing XP SP2: HostMemoryLow when formatting disk

[Jason Fordham]

I installed VirtualBox 2.1.0 on a Windows Server 2003 host with 2 dual core CPUs (Xeon X5270) and 32 GB RAM (It's a SunFire X4150). I created a VM with 2 GB RAM, 16 MB video, and an 80 GB dynamic disk, and started to install Windows XP Pro + SP2.

At the moment where Setup tries to format the drive, I get a dialog box titled "VirtualBox - Error", and the narrative is "Unable to allocate and lock memory. The virtual machine will be paused. Please close applications to free up memory or close the VM." The error ID is HostMemoryLow, Severity: Non-Fatal Error.

The Physical Memory panel in Task Manager in the host shows me that there's 3355412 K in total, and 30736100 K or so Available. PF Usage is 2.39 GB. So there's no shortage of memory. There are no other applications running.

I attach the log.

[Jason Fordham]

vbox.log

[Jason Fordham]

Same failure occurs with a 20 GB fixed size disk image.

[Jason Fordham]

Format 20 GB fixed size disk works with 1 GB RAM allocated.

[Jason Fordham]

By binary chop, the VM has this error at 1892 MB but not 1891 MB.

Why can't I allocate a VM larger than this? Is this because the underlying host is 32-bit Windows?

[Jay]

I have exactly the same problem . W2003 host, 4 GB of memory. 250GB HDD

Guest : Linux, 80GB HDD (Dynamic), 2GB of ram.

Free memory at the point of the error message is 2GB. It would appear that Virtual Box is running the guest in the application memory space (or whatever it's called) and therefore has a limit of 2GB.

Please confirm.

[Dawn]

I also have this problem. Host: windows 2003, 8 GB memory Guest: windows xp 2GB memory

[Sander van Leeuwen]

There indeed needs to be room in the process' virtual address space for the entire guest RAM. You can try to increase the process address space to 3 GB (search on google); at least you can do this with XP.

Unfortunately there's no easy way for us to fix this limitation. 64 bits hosts don't have such a problem.