Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Power up failed (vrc=VERR_VMX_MSR_LOCKED_OR_DISABLED, rc=E_FAIL (0X80004005))

I recently tried to use VirtualBox to run a Virtual Machine on my new laptop which is a HP EliteBook 8530w. But after attempting to start the VM I encountered the following error: Power up failed (vrc=VERR_VMX_MSR_LOCKED_OR_DISABLED, rc=E_FAIL (0X80004005))

So as per the return code, this is telling me that VT-x is either locked or not enabled. It can't be locked as this is running on Windows 7 which does not have any other virtualizer running, i.e. VirtualPC or Hyper-V. It is enabled as I explicitly set virtualization in the BIOS. It turns out that I needed to also enable Txt Technology. Once Txt Technology was enabled, the VM fire-up! nice

I am not normally a VM person, but my new laptop is a beast. 8Gb of RAM so I can allocate 4Gb to the VM and it runs like a host OS.

5 comments:

Jason said...

Since documentation on this seems to be very vague, can you update the post with how you did this? I have the same laptop with the same issue.

Anonymous said...

Hi Jason,

The steps are really only one:

1) Go into your BIOS (ESC, F10, F12, etc), look under the Advanced option, your should see something there that states 'Virtual Technology' or something to that effect. Switch it from Disabled to Enabled. Save and reboot.

Good luck.

Kurt

Anonymous said...

Checking (and enabling) CPU virtualisation in the BIOS fixed this problem for me too; nearly the same error (but NS_ERROR rather than E_FAIL) on VBox for Solaris.

Thanks for posting :-).

Anonymous said...

Ran into this same issue with WinXP running as VBOX on Mint. When I upgraded the Mint software, using update manager, VBOX threw off this error. Went into BIOS and enabled virtualization on the processor and it was fixed. Thanks very much! I didn't want to lose all the work invested in this VM so far.

Hank

Unknown said...

Yeah! CPU virtualisation in the BIOS! it's helped me! thx all!