Windows 2000 racing condition issue during setup

[marcantoinegodde]

Hello everyone,

I am trying to setup a Windows 2000 Pro (SP4) guest on my MacBook Pro M2. I am very likely facing the racing condition bug during setup as mentioned in the VirtualBox documentation.

As far as I understand the issue, it seems that I should add some sort of latency on my IDE drive. I also found reference to that in an old VMWare documentation.

Indeed, during the installation of Distributed Transaction Coordinator (DTC), the VM reboots and loops back to the Regional Settings screen. I can attest that some of my installations finished successfully but those must be random events then.

Is there any way to fix this in UTM? I understand it might be a QEMU problem but is it possible to fix it in QEMU then?

Thanks :)

PS: the fix -cpu qemu32,level=1 isn't useful there as I don't get any BSOD.

[changanmoon]

Same here when I was installing Windows 2000 on UTM v4.6.4.

(Edit: Below workaround works well with Windows 2000 SP4 (All variants). For other Windows 2000 installation images (RTM, SP1, SP2, SP3), the results may vary.

If this doesn't help you, you can change to UTM 4.5.3 and before.)

I've found one workaround by referencing this link: QEMU User Documentation — QEMU documentation.

It seems that QEMU has already introduced a solution for Windows 2000 installation issue, however, this might works differently on UTM.

For those who don't know how to add parameters on UTM, just use this template for you: Windows 2000.utm.zip.

Or you can set the virtual machine manually:

First, in the VM list, right-click Windows 2000 VM and click "Edit".

Click "System". You need to make sure the VM's architecture is i386.

If not, change it to "i386 (x86)". (Note that UTM prompts you "This change will reset all settings, any unsaved changes will be lost", so you may have to set up those previous settings again, including turning off UFEI boot.)

Then, go to "Arguments", add the following line in the argument list:

-global ide-device.win2k-install-hack=on

After copying the line above, don't forget to press Enter key on your keyboard to make sure this argument will be saved with the VM.

Click "Save" button to save the changes above, power on the VM.

Now you can clean install Windows 2000 as usual. And... voilà!

After successfully booting into the system, you can shut down the VM and remove that argument, since it may affect the performance of IDE transferring.

[marcantoinegodde]

So I tried with the Qemu argument alone and even with your template, just to be sure, and it doesn't seem to work. I tried multiple setup, I had just one successful. It's very random.

[changanmoon]

So I tried with the Qemu argument alone and even with your template, just to be sure, and it doesn't seem to work. I tried multiple setup, I had just one successful. It's very random.

Hmm... that's very strange. 🤨 I've tested that with several SP4 images.

Perhaps you can try older versions of UTM, such as UTM 4.5.3 and before, because Windows 2000 installation failure problem presents from version v4.5.4 to the latest 4.6.4.

[Dknightsure]

I use the Windows 2000.utm.zip. but I get a problem. Windows 2000 system keeps installing in a loop