Version 17 (modified by 13 years ago) ( diff ) | ,
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How to enable logging for the .MSI host installer of VirtualBox
There are two logs which are needed for an in-depth analysis: The installer log and the driver installation log of Windows itself. Please provide both logs when asked for them.
Cleaning Up
If you are experiencing installation problems on Windows hosts you might want to run the Microsoft Installer CleanUp Utility. It's available for free here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301 It does not uninstall VirtualBox itself but provides a way to clean the registry from leftover data of former installation procedures.
Installer Log
Automatic activation
To enable logging while installing VirtualBox for Windows, start the installer executable (e.g. "VirtualBox-3.2.12-68302-Win.exe") with the additional parameter "/l". To do that, open a command line window, navigate to the directory which contains the installer executable and run
VirtualBox-<your-version>-Win.exe /l
Note: Please make sure you substituted <your-version>
with the right version string of your installer executable.
Manual activation
To manually enable logging in a persistent manner, do the following:
- Go to Start -> "Run ..."
- Type in "regedit.exe" and press Enter
- Navigate to the key "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer" (Left pane). If the key itself doesn't exist, just create it.
- In the right pane, right click and choose "New" -> "String value"
- Name the value "Logging".
- Double click on the new created "Logging" value and set the value to "voicewarmupx"
- Close regedit.exe
How to retrieve the log files
After the steps above the VirtualBox host installer should produce a log starting with "MSI" in your temporary directory the next time you're starting the installer.
On 32-bit Windows XP, the temporary directory is usually located at "C:\Documents and Settings\<Your Username>\Local Settings\Temp\".
On 64-bit Windows XP and on Windows Vista / Windows 7 it can be found at "C:\Users\<Your Username>\AppData\Local\Temp".
Be sure you're picking the most recent one by sorting the files by date!
Driver Installation Log
Enable logging in the registry: In key
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\!CurrentVersion\Setup
set/create a value called LogLevel
of the type DWORD
and set it to the hexadecimal value 4800FFFF
. This will enable the verbose driver logging.
Either in C:\Windows
or in C:\Windows\Inf
you'll then find some logs called
- setupapi.log
- setupapi.app.log
- setupapi.dev.log
To be sure that only the needed information for VirtualBox will be in these files, please delete (or rename) them before starting the VirtualBox installation.
After you ran the VirtualBox installer please attach these logs in a compressed format (e.g. ZIP/RAR/...) to your bug report.