Arch Linux

tuttiarch

Member

Registered: 2015-01-31

Posts: 17

VirtualBox Windows 10/11 guests crashing constantly (BSOD)

Hi all,

Since a few weeks/months I am experiencing tons of crashes, BSOD and boot errors on my Windows 10 guest. Before that everything ran stable as a rock. I rarely need the Windows VM, so I kind of went for "wait and see" but now I really need to work with the VM for some things. I thought that maybe my Windows files were somehow corrupted and tried to set up a new VM with Windows 11. However, even there, the installer crashes constantly at some seemingly random progress. Finally, I tried to install the Oracle official binary and hoped for it to work (there is another thread in this forum that suggests the Oracle binary might be more stable than the Arch Linux one). Unfortunately, there was no change in the behavior at all and I still have constant crashes and can barely work with the VM.

The error messages during BSOD are seemingly random as well (sometimes "Page Fault In Nonpaged Area" but there are others). 1 out of 10 tries to boot succeeds and I can work for a few minutes before it crashes again.

Unfortunately, I am at a complete loss here. Any ideas what I should look into are much appreciated. I don't even know where to start looking for issues with this. Can you think of any tests that I could run to narrow down the issue?

Cheers.

AndrewG777

Member

Registered: 2025-09-02

Posts: 30

Re: VirtualBox Windows 10/11 guests crashing constantly (BSOD)

Your hardware may be faulty. Especially the CPU.

Lone_Wolf

Administrator

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 14,834

Re: VirtualBox Windows 10/11 guests crashing constantly (BSOD)

Does an archlinux guest VM show similar symptoms ?

Please run on the host as root / with root rights

# journalctl -b | curl -F 'file=@-' 0x0.st

It will upload your system journal to a public hosting site and output a link.
post that link.

---

Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.

clean chroot building not flexible enough ?
Try clean chroot manager by graysky

tuttiarch

Member

Registered: 2015-01-31

Posts: 17

Re: VirtualBox Windows 10/11 guests crashing constantly (BSOD)

Thank for your replies. I just tried and I could successfully boot the Arch Linux live/installer ISO multiple times without error. I also don't experience any issues on the host itself - I would expect as much if the CPU was somehow faulty (... on the other hand, I am not an expert).

Here is the log that you requested: http://0x0.st/KW4t.txt

If you need it to be a bit more "tidy", I can try to try to gather the log shortly after a reboot of the host.

tuttiarch

Member

Registered: 2015-01-31

Posts: 17

Re: VirtualBox Windows 10/11 guests crashing constantly (BSOD)

I am still facing this issue. Any help is much appreciated.

cryptearth

Member

Registered: 2024-02-03

Posts: 2,007

Re: VirtualBox Windows 10/11 guests crashing constantly (BSOD)

is there any reason you use virtualbox at all instead of qemu/kvm?
i ditched vbox back when i was on windows 7 and haven't encountered any issues running win10/11 in a kvm
so - maybe ditch vbox in favor of qemu/kvm?

or to put it this way: is there any reason you REQUIRE vbox in the first place? note: vbox requires additional kernel modules which could be at fault as the real root cause and the bluescreens are just the result this error manifests to you

Last edited by cryptearth (2025-12-09 21:53:38)

Lone_Wolf

Administrator

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 14,834

Re: VirtualBox Windows 10/11 guests crashing constantly (BSOD)

Seems I forgot to check the log, sorry for that.

Avahi reports a potential mdns conflict and chrome shows 2 coredumps but otherwise nothing stands out.

One thing you can try is installing/booting the linux-lts kernel.

---

Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.

clean chroot building not flexible enough ?
Try clean chroot manager by graysky

tuttiarch

Member

Registered: 2015-01-31

Posts: 17

Re: VirtualBox Windows 10/11 guests crashing constantly (BSOD)

Thanks for checking. I am puzzled by this since I don't see anyone else having this issue. Before trying the linux-lts kernel, I decided to give qemu/kvm a try (I ran into issues with KVM a few years ago and switched to VirtualBox back then). So far, I installed Windows 11 and it is running without any issues. Since I don't see any hardware related problems on the host and KVM runs fine until now, I will migrate the Windows software to this new VM and just remove VirtualBox...

Thanks for the hint and your help!