Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 04 August 2008 15:51
Business IT -
Technology
Page 2 of 3
Thinking it was just some glitch, I tried rebooting again, but as I was fiddling with the touch pad, I was able to boot back into Windows, thinking all was ok once more. But the mouse was stuck, as was the keyboard.
I thought it must have had something to do with the VirtualBox tools for Windows, so I tried plugging in an external USB keyboard and mouse. But that didn’t work either!
Rebooting again just took me back to a black screen with white arrow in “stuck mode”, so I decided to try “safe mode” to see if I could run System Restore and restore my system to a time before I’d loaded the Virtualbox tools.
But no dice... the same thing happened. It would get to a certain point and then just stop on a black screen after showing me the boot sequence in white text.
I tried various safe modes and “last known good configurations”... all with the same result!
At this point I realised I needed to get my original Vista disc, and run the “repair” mode. So, I did just that, placing my Vista disc in the drive, booting from it and choosing to repair.
It’s in here that I realised I could start System Restore. I actually knew this already because I had remembered reading about it, but very rarely need to do System Restores and could always do them from “safe mode”, so it was a very pleasant re-discovery and I immediately tried it out.
Thankfully... it worked perfectly. I restored to a time before I’d loaded VirtualBox, and everything was back to normal.
Clearly, Vista didn’t seem to like the VirtualBox drivers for the mouse and keyboard.
Given that I had more important things to do with my time than stuff around with Ubuntu, I decided to shelve the project for the time being, deleting my virtual Ubuntu OS inside its virtual file, and doing some research online to see if others had experienced anything similar.
It’s been a couple of weeks since then, and I decided to check out VirtualBox again, only to discover that it has received a new “
maintenance update”, taking it to version 1.6.4 on the 30th of July, 2008.
Continued on page 3.
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