Blue Screen (BSOD) on VirtualBox VM

I’ve got to handle it to Oracle; their virtualization software VirtualBox is amazing…and free! It’s features surpass Windows Virtual PC by leaps and are on par with VMWare Workstation. Lately I have been using it for all my host-based virtualization needs.

I am in the process of setting up a new computer and part of that means moving all my VMs. I use the export and then import feature in VirtualBox to do this. After I moved a Windows XP machine it would not boot on the new PC, and kept bluescreening continuously. This was the error:

VirtualBox Bluescreen

DRIVER_UNLOADED_WITHOUT_CANCELLING_PENDING_OPERATIONS caused by intelppm.sys.

After a brief Google search I turned up this post by Ben Armstrong (Virtual PC Guy) from the Microsoft virtualization team:http://blogs.msdn.com/b/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2005/10/25/problems-with-intelppm-sys-and-processr-sys-under-virtual-pc-virtual-server.aspx

According to Ben this driver; intelppm.sys, processr.sys and perhaps also p3.sys can cause problems when they try to do something that is not supported by the hypervisor. Apparently the problem affects Microsoft products such as Virtual PC and Virtual Server as well. There is also a ticket logged for VirtualBox regarding this issue: http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/420

The solution is to boot into Safe Mode (F8 during start up) and entering one or more of these commands, depending on which driver is causing the issue:

  • sc config p3 start= disabled
  • sc config intelppm start= disabled
  • sc config processr= disabled

You could also follow the instructions in Ben’s post and do these changes manually in the Registry.

5 thoughts on “Blue Screen (BSOD) on VirtualBox VM”

  1. Hello,

    very nice post. But when I tried to disable processr.sys (this file cause crash of my virtual machine), I got an error (transalted from German) “called service is not an installed service”. Do you have any ideas, how I could resolve the issue?

    Greetings from Hamburg,
    Andrey

    1. because the correct syntax is
      sc config processor start= disabled

      note the missing “o” and “start”

      HTH
      Thomas

  2. Hello!

    Same problem (BSOD with intelppm.sys).

    W7 (host) with XP (guest virtualbox) moved to W81 (host) with vmware workstation.
    Under W81 host W7 guest start fine, but XP (virtualbox guest) starts with BSOD.
    Solution: It seems under vmworkstation i have to set manually the W7 property: “Virtualize Intel VT-x/EPT or AMD-V/RVI.” (based: https://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-8970).

    After it all nested vm works well.

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