Screen Grays Out and Keyboard and Mouse Stop For a Time Now and Then

[oldefoxx]

My wufe reoorted this problem to me, and I confirmed it. Under VirtualBox, using FireFox to visit embroidery sites, the screen fades down to barely visible and neither the mouse or keyboard will do anything. This is with Windows 2000 Pro installed as the client. Using FireFox under Ubuntu, the host, no such problem has been observed. It also happens under Windows 2000 Pro when reading email using IncrediMail. It may only last for a minute, then returns to normal. This is on a Gateway desktop, which has to run Ubuntu 9.04 because it has problems when trying to use Ubuntu 9.10, such as the mouse may not show up or move after booting up. It just seems to me that the graydown is an indication of high activity or slow response on the network, but I don't know for sure.

On an Asus desktop, a different problem. I can get into a state where the CD-ROM drive is locked in a mount state, and the forcemout option does nothing. I found one way to get the disk ejected is to use the sudo mode and execute eject /dev/sr0. But the mount state persists, and I've had to close down the guest, VirtualBox, and sometimes reboot to get it to clear. One cause might be that if I click on GuestAdditions without first clearing the link to the CD-ROM drive, that might cause it. Might be better that clicking on any CD-ROM link clears the others immediately.

I was impressed to find that I can set aside a large file for the local C drive, then use a tool like Acronis to restore more than one partition into it, and the drive letters will range from C up to the last correctly. It takes about ten times longer to do a restore in this fashion, but it preserved letter order which is essential under Windows. The CD-ROM drive then takes the first drive letter following the last partiton. This is really great, and I mean that. But for some reason, none of the partitions will boot up after that, though the boot process is intact. I've spent endless days trying to work out a recovery process, and only just succeeded yesterday. What I am wondering is why the boot process failed for Windows once the restore was complete.