11 Troubleshooting
These problems are all caused by a bug in the hard disk driver of Windows 2000. After issuing a hard disk request, there is a race condition in the Windows driver code which leads to corruption if the operation completes too fast, i.e. the hardware in- terrupt from the IDE controller arrives too soon. With physical hardware, there is a guaranteed delay in most systems so the problem is usually hidden there (however it should be possible to reproduce it on physical hardware as well). In a virtual environ- ment, it is possible for the operation to be done immediately (especially on very fast systems with multiple CPUs) and the interrupt is signaled sooner than on a physical system. The solution is to introduce an artificial delay before delivering such inter- rupts. This delay can be configured for a VM using the following command:
VBoxManage setextradata VMNAME "VBoxInternal/Devices/piix3ide/0/Config/IRQDelay" 1
This sets the delay to one millisecond. In case this doesn’t help, increase it to a value between 1 and 5 milliseconds. Please note that this slows down disk performance. After installation, you should be able to remove the key (or set it to 0).
11.2.4How to record bluescreen information from Windows guests
When Windows guests run into a kernel crash, they display the infamous bluescreen. Depending on how Windows is configured, the information will remain on the screen until the machine is restarted or it will reboot automatically. During installation, Win- dows is usually configured to reboot automatically. With automatic reboots, there is no chance to record the bluescreen information which might be important for problem determination.
VirtualBox provides a method of halting a guest when it wants to perform a reset. In order to enable this feature, issue the following command:
VBoxManage setextradata VMNAME "VBoxInternal/PDM/HaltOnReset" 1
11.2.5 No networking in Windows Vista guests
Unfortunately, with Vista, Microsoft dropped support for the virtual AMD PCNet card that we are providing to virtual machines. As a result, after installation, Vista guests initially have no networking. VirtualBox therefore ships a driver for that card with the Windows Guest Additions; see chapter 4.3.5, Windows Vista networking, page 64.
Starting with version 1.6.0 VirtualBox can emulate an Intel E1000 network device which is supported by Vista without any
11.2.6 Windows guests may cause a high CPU load
Several background applications of Windows guests, especially virus scanners, are known to increases the CPU load notably even if the guest appears to be idle. We recommend to deactivate virus scanners within virtualized guests if possible.
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