Solaris 10 5/08 install and 64-bit mode issues

[Penguin81]

Hardware:

Dell Optiplex 755, Intel Core2 vPro 3GHz CPU, 4 GB RAM, 160 GB HDD

Two problems encountered:

1) When 2048 MB of RAM allocated to a virtual machine, the Solaris installer crashes when trying to boot XWindows to walk though an interactive install. 1536 MB allocated RAM works fine.

2) Solaris 10 5/08 install won't boot into 64-mode despite having met all requirements. All virtual hardware extensions have been enabled in the BIOS and enabled on newly created virtual machines. New installs run and guest OS doesn't recognize 64-bit capability.

See forum posting for further detail.

​http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=9409

[Sander van Leeuwen]

VT-x is not enabled on your machine. Check your BIOS please.

[Sander van Leeuwen]

Mind these two lines in the log:

HWACCM: No VMX or SVM CPU extension found. Reason VERR_VMX_MSR_LOCKED_OR_DISABLED HWACCM: VMX MSR_IA32_FEATURE_CONTROL=ff03

Your BIOS has not enabled VT-x properly. If you have really turned in on in the BIOS, then try to find a newer BIOS.

[Penguin81]

I upgraded the Dell OptiPlex 755 BIOS from version A9 to A10, made sure the BIOS extensions were still enabled, and restarted the machine with no luck. It was still 32-bit mode.

I also did a fresh Solaris 10 guest install and all of the extensions enabled with no luck.

Do you know of a Solaris 10 utility to check if other programs can see the VT-x capability or not?

Thanks.

[Penguin81]

64-bit problem solved.

Trusted Extensions was on in the BIOS, preventing anything new from using the hardware extensions. All I did was turn Trusted Extensions off and both Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris were able to run in 64-bit mode.

Thanks for all your help.