Virtual Box CompareExchange128 Error on Windows 10 install

If you get the “CompareExchange128” error – a CPU related error  – when trying to install Windows 10 with VirtualBox, Dirk Strauss has the solution for you:

  • shut down the vm
  • open a cmd prompt and point it to the installation directory of your VirtualBox (most likely C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox)
  • then type “vboxmanage setextradata [vmname] VBoxInternal/CPUM/CMPXCHG16B 1”
  • don´t forget to replace [vmname] with the name of your virtual machine (I had some trouble with blank spaces, so you might wanna rename your VM for a second)
  • restart the vm
  • install Windows 10

Virtual Box

vbox2Recently I was looking for a virtualization software because I needed a virtual operating system to test stuff and a place to install iTunes where it couldn´t do any harm.

More accidentally I found Sun´s Virtual Box – which is free and open source. It´s small, fast, reliable, supports x64 virtual systems on a 32bit machine, runs on several plattforms (win, mac, linux, open solaris) and is very advanced in it´s functionality.

And did I mention that it´s free ?

I´m using it with a Windows 7 x64, a Windows XP x64 and a Windows XP 32bit installation and in all 3 environments it runs great. For windows users it provides a nice graphical user interface.

vbox1It supports USB, LAN and IDE / SATA sharing – the guest with the host machine and a possibility to pass-through the devices directly to the virtual machine. Furthermore you can mount iso´s directly into the virtual machine and use them as boot device or simply as CD-drive.

The only thing I miss is a good Direct 3D integration. Though there is an (experimental) support for D3D, it doesn´t work to good practically. I tested it with some older games and most of them fail to recognize the virtual graphics adapter as a real D3D compatible graphic card. This is kinda sad, cause it would have been an easy possibility to enjoy older games in a Windows XP or a MSDOS virtual machine.

But as final conclusion – if you need a free, reliable and fast virtualization software, Sun´s Virtual Box is your pick.

Resizing a VirtualBox VDI image / hard disk

I´m using Sun´s VirtualBox for a while to host multiple Operating Systems on my machine. I discovered that it is not possible to re-size fixed disk images without doing a completely fresh install of that virtual machine. I found a quite helpful post at Nick Heppelston´s BizTalk Blog to solve this problem.

I found this fascinating quote today:

In my previous post I extolled the virtues of Sun’s desktop virtualisation software, VirtualBox. One thing niggled me though – I couldn’t easily expand a Virtual Disk Image (VDI) and was regularly reaching the space limits of the modest 20Gb disks I was creating; I needed an easy way of expanding disks before I could use it as my main virtualisation platform and felt comfortable in recommending it to my readers.modhul.com, Nick Heppleston’s BizTalk Blog, Dec 2009

You should read the whole article.