New Laptop and it keeps crashing with blue screen of death when VirtualBox is started

BlueScreen1
BlueScreen1 Member Posts: 3 New User
edited September 2023 in 2019 Archives
I brought a new Acer Aspire 3 laptop about a month ago. Everytime I start VirtualBox I get a blue screen of death, its not always after the same time frame, it is totally random, some times it will happen instantly and others it will last for 10 min and without any warning it dies. I 
specs are itb 1TbB HDD 32GB DDR4 Ram AMD Ryxen 3 2200U and the graphics card  is AMD Radeon Vega3

I have a lot of programs installed n it like xampp virtualbox visual suite firefox chrome java vnodearound 8 virtual komodo edit,  machine s fileziler putty the list is endless but i only ever have a program running while I need it and always shut it down once done. I had to upgrade ram cos it was very very slow out of the box with 4gb and went for the best available now. I am at my wits end with it, I need VM to give me a separate environment and its is one of my most used programs 

I  have read every post here regarding blue screen errors and I have tried uninstalling my Avast anti virus and my avast vpn but nothing I do stops this happening, I have tried to run with all combonations of settings to and again no joy.
I can not do my job without it.
Thing is it used to work when it was brand new but for it to develop blue screen errors only 4weeks in to its life is ridiculous 

Answers

  • BlueScreen1
    BlueScreen1 Member Posts: 3 New User
    Sorry about the spelling mistakes I should have proof read it before posting.

    Also noticed the windows key and the fn key are backwards, i have to press windows key for functions and functions key for windows this seems like something hard to get wrong but its been this way since day 0???
  • BlueScreen1
    BlueScreen1 Member Posts: 3 New User
    I have solved this issue, it was a complete headache and took hours of reading and searching but basically I downloaded a tool called winDBG.exe from Microsoft found a guide I could understand as many are not aimed at a complete newbie to world of Windows debugging. This is a well explained step by step simple explanation however you still have to google a lot of output and look for clues as not all issues are exactly the same . Unless you have some rough idea of that you are looking for you just get lost in the huge amount of output and multiple panels within winDBG.exe and nothing seems to make any sense.

    https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/windows-and-office/how-do-i-use-windbg-debugger-to-troubleshoot-a-blue-screen-of-death/

    I then started VirtualBox and let it blue screen. When it started  again started the winDBG (as administrator). You have to tell it where to find your systems symbols as explained here.

    https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/ff558829

    I then used the a built in option in winDBG.exe that lets you open a dump file by choosing where the dump is. Windows will dump a huge file under its system root which is C:\Windows or there are smaller ones called mini dumps they are found under C:\Windows\Minidump you then start the program off and follow the steps in the guide above and it gives you a step by step account of what happened, in my case there was two problems, a system driver was being blocked by a driver that was no longer in use and had been left behind by uninstalling Avast Anti Virus software I had uninstalled because once I had paid for the software they kept finding new issues with different spin offs of there software like cookie tracker pro and driver restorer etc.

    The left over driver was clashing with svchost.exe and this is a system critical process, the other problem it found was a broken shared folder with the VM I had used to upload some files to the VM with and had deleted at a later date with out unlinking it in the settings of VirtualBox. 

    For future reference if you ever need to uninstall a program like an antivirus or any big program really you should shut your machine down and start it in safe mode to do the uninstall, this stops things like this from happening as often. My laptop feels ten times faster and no lag at all so I believe this was coursing more issues than I was aware of and starting VirtualBox took it to a place it could not recover from. Windows defender is perfectly capable of doing the same job as paid for software and in many cases it does a better job. The paid for services need you to feel like they are protecting you and they achieve this by releasing things that they know there software will catch and you will think its working, its a con really! 

    Anyway I hope this helps anyone who is stuck with blue screen madness there is hope I promise you!