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Kubuntu 12.04.02 Virtualbox 4.2 x64 | ubuntu ppa does the same

Problem: Windows XP 32bit guest extremely slow HDD IO appears to be on full load

Virtualbox spec: display ram 128mb 2d enabled IDE 32 bit Guest additions installed changed and checked I/O cache settings

When running virtualbox from terminal it says "E*rror opening file for reading: Permission denied*" This seems to be related to kde cache

Should not be a PC /hardware issue, checked different HDD with same result. CPU is intel i5 2500K slightly overclocked. Z68 mainboard chip (checked sata 2&3 ports)

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  • "HDD IO appears to be on full load" <--- Are you talking about the virtual HDD, or the physical HDD?
    – ignis
    Jul 2, 2013 at 21:05
  • Where is your virtual guest hard drive? Did you install on a VDI file? How did you install XP? My XP 32-bit runs faster than ever on an old Athlon dual core 12.04 64-bit host.
    – Takkat
    Jul 3, 2013 at 6:33
  • High IO appears for the guest, guest drive is external HDD, exchanged the HDD vs anotehr without success. Guest Disc file is VHd what always worked fine.
    – user115639
    Jul 3, 2013 at 10:18
  • Now the guest died, spawning a black screen saying "A disk error occured" - Ill swicth the os now to try on a blank installation.
    – user115639
    Jul 3, 2013 at 10:22
  • Turned out that the default kubuntu installation has/had problems with permissions, also the hdd was broken, those two circumstances came together. S.M.A.R.T detection did not report an issue. HDD fail detected with "hdparm" ie "hdparm -tT /dev/sdX" . Buffered reads where below 1 mbps
    – user115639
    Jul 5, 2013 at 20:06

1 Answer 1

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Thats the tricky thing here too - If you have Ubuntu 64 - Bit - installation on to a machine like intel-core-2-duo ( 1st generation ) and there is Vista or XP. But Vista resp. XP run only as 32-Bit-Systems. Then one cannot take 32-Bit-System of virtualbox ?! - not sure if this works with 64-Bit of Ubuntu - it would work better with Vista resp. XP - so it is worth a try to take virtualbox as 32-Bit program ( not the one built as 64-Bit program ) ?! ( have not tried that yet - but expect this to work better then and Windows-32-Bit-systems are then not slowly any more ).

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  • Is this based on experience or knowledge? It sounds like a guess. Since VBox is run on the host, I see no reason for which VBox 32bit should run differently.
    – ignis
    Jul 2, 2013 at 21:05
  • @dschinn Your answer is barely comprehensible, please rephrase. No, running 32-bit OS on a Virtualbox 64-bit host is not a big issue. It costs a bit of performance but doesn't reduce it as drastically as stated in the question.
    – LiveWireBT
    Jul 2, 2013 at 21:58

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