Can you help fix my broken VM?

July 30, 2010 8:18 AM

Can you help fix my virtual machine? (details inside)

Running Virtualbox 3.2.6

Host machine: Windows 7 (64bit - Enterprise edition) on a compal hel80 with a Core 2 Duo T7200

The guest machine is Gentoo Linux (also 64 bit).

Everything was working fine until this morning. The host machine went to sleep while the guest was running. When I woke it up, the machine Blue Screened. After restarting, I tried to launch the guest and I receive the error "This kernel requires an x86-64 CPU, but only detected an i686 CPU."

In the virtualbox log I found the following:
HWACCM: No VT-x or AMD-V CPU extension found. Reason VERR_VMX_MSR_LOCKED_OR_DISABLED
HWACCM: VMX_MSR_IA32_FEATURE_CONTROL=1

There's no option in my bios to enable virtualization, but I assume it's on since I was able to run the guest successfully in the past.

I tried uninstalling virtualbox and reinstalling - using the same guest, but to no avail. I also tried booting (the guest machine) off the install cd, but get the same error. I made a new machine using the same virtual harddrive - same error.

Any other suggestions?

posted by chndrcks to computers & internet (6 answers total)

In the machine preferences under System/Processor, do you have the "Enable PAE/NX" checked? What about System/Acceleration "Enable VT-x/AMD-V"?
posted by Sonic_Molson at 8:53 AM on July 30, 2010

You might try updating the BIOS on your host machine, and seeing if your virtualization options change.
posted by crazycanuck at 8:59 AM on July 30, 2010

In the machine preferences under System/Processor, do you have the "Enable PAE/NX" checked? What about System/Acceleration "Enable VT-x/AMD-V"?

Originally, Enable VT-x was checked, but Enable PAE/NX was not. I've tried all combinations og checking and unchecking them with no success
posted by chndrcks at 9:06 AM on July 30, 2010

Well, I decided to give this instructions a try: http://forum.notebookreview.com/compal/237988-hardware-virtualization-hel80-81-a.html

They seem to have worked, but I'm still not sure how virtualization got turned off in the first place.
posted by chndrcks at 9:40 AM on July 30, 2010

In VMWare as a possible solution you could do something along the lines of creating a new virtual machine using the old one's hard drive file, dunno if that works in VirtualBox.
posted by XMLicious at 10:00 AM on July 30, 2010

Oops, you found a solution already. Bad me for not previewing.
posted by XMLicious at 10:01 AM on July 30, 2010