Boot screen contents not showing up...

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Bo Berglund - 06 Sep 2008 09:56 GMT

I have noted a strange behaviour in VPC:
Sometrimes when I start a guest (XP-Pro) the initial boot screen is
completely black with no text and then after a while the Windows XP
startup screen appears with the progress bar.
The really strange thing is that while the main window does not shopw
any text I can see in the thumbnailo in VPC console that it displays
text that changes while the main window is empty!

Why is it so that the main windows does not show anything while the
thumbnail does?

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Bo Berglund (Sweden)

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FACE - 06 Sep 2008 12:26 GMT

On Sat, 06 Sep 2008 10:56:59 +0200, in microsoft.public.virtualpc, Bo
Berglund <boberglund@home.se>, wrote

>I have noted a strange behaviour in VPC:
>Sometrimes when I start a guest (XP-Pro) the initial boot screen is
[quoted text clipped - 6 lines]
>Why is it so that the main windows does not show anything while the
>thumbnail does?

This is a really interesting one. So you are saying that you do not even
get the BIOS display portion at boot?

The implication is that screen display has been set of 'OFF' and I wonder
how that could be this early in the game unless there is a display
definition in the BIOS -- that is then overridden by Windows...........

Observation says that those thumbnails are the result of display output,
or more precisely, computer output which could actually bypass any screen
output...........

FACE

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FACE - 06 Sep 2008 12:44 GMT

On Sat, 06 Sep 2008 07:26:18 -0400, in microsoft.public.virtualpc, FACE
<AFaceInTheCrowd@today.net>, wrote

>On Sat, 06 Sep 2008 10:56:59 +0200, in microsoft.public.virtualpc, Bo
>Berglund <boberglund@home.se>, wrote
[quoted text clipped - 22 lines]
>
>FACE

I just looked at the BIOS of a DOS 6.22 VM. Go into the BIOS and make
sure that "Quiet Boot" is disabled. That is on a subscreen from "Advanced
-->Boot Settings Configuration.".

FACE

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Bo Berglund - 06 Sep 2008 13:05 GMT

>On Sat, 06 Sep 2008 07:26:18 -0400, in microsoft.public.virtualpc, FACE
><AFaceInTheCrowd@today.net>, wrote
[quoted text clipped - 27 lines]
>sure that "Quiet Boot" is disabled. That is on a subscreen from "Advanced
>-->Boot Settings Configuration.".

OK, but how can I get into the BIOS of the guest when all there is is
a black screen???? The console thumbnail resolution is too small to
enable use of that as a display.
Really strange.
However, my guest comes up afterwards and operates even though I feel
that it is "flakey" in the responses. Basically I can do some tasks
normally, but then all of a sudden it gets unresponsive for about 5
seconds or so and then it comes back.
The guest and host are both XP-Pro SP2. I have given the guest 512 Mb
RAM out of the 2 Gb I have on the host. No other guests are running.

And I am using VPC2004SP1 because this guest MUST communicate over the
COM1 serial port and this does not work in VPC2007.

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Bo Berglund (Sweden)

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FACE - 06 Sep 2008 13:40 GMT

On Sat, 06 Sep 2008 14:05:17 +0200, in microsoft.public.virtualpc, Bo
Berglund <boberglund@home.se>, wrote

>>On Sat, 06 Sep 2008 07:26:18 -0400, in microsoft.public.virtualpc, FACE
>><AFaceInTheCrowd@today.net>, wrote
[quoted text clipped - 41 lines]
>And I am using VPC2004SP1 because this guest MUST communicate over the
>COM1 serial port and this does not work in VPC2007.

Shut down the machine. Press start on the vpc console and hold down
right-alt(hostkey) & delete.

*******

I just moved to an XP SP2 machine and did that...........the BIOS is the
same. Read the explanation of quiet boot disabled/enabled in the
rightmost box of that subscreen. It seems to explain it, if the first OEM
logo is WINDOWS.

FACE

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