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<topic xml:lang="en-us" id="ts_win2k-guest-install">
  <title>Windows 2000 Installation Failures</title>
  
  <body>
    <p>
        When installing Windows 2000 guests, you might run into one of
        the following issues:
      </p>
    <ul>
      <li>
        <p>
            Installation reboots, usually during component registration.
          </p>
      </li>
      <li>
        <p>
            Installation fills the whole hard disk with empty log files.
          </p>
      </li>
      <li>
        <p>
            Installation complains about a failure installing
            <filepath>msgina.dll</filepath>.
          </p>
      </li>
    </ul>
    <p>
        These problems are all caused by a bug in the hard disk driver
        of Windows 2000. After issuing a hard disk request, there is a
        race condition in the Windows driver code which leads to
        corruption if the operation completes too fast. For example, the
        hardware interrupt from the IDE controller arrives too soon.
        With physical hardware, there is a guaranteed delay in most
        systems so the problem is usually hidden there. However, it
        should be possible to also reproduce it on physical hardware. In
        a virtual environment, it is possible for the operation to be
        done immediately, especially on very fast systems with multiple
        CPUs, and the interrupt is signaled sooner than on a physical
        system. The solution is to introduce an artificial delay before
        delivering such interrupts. This delay can be configured for a
        VM using the following command:
      </p>
    <pre xml:space="preserve">$ VBoxManage setextradata <varname>VM-name</varname> "VBoxInternal/Devices/piix3ide/0/Config/IRQDelay" 1</pre>
    <p>
        This sets the delay to one millisecond. In case this does not
        help, increase it to a value between 1 and 5 milliseconds.
        Please note that this slows down disk performance. After
        installation, you should be able to remove the key, or set it to
        0.
      </p>
  </body>
  
</topic>
