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

[nathanjackson]

I have been trying to get Windows 2000 to install in QEMU and came across this page.

I don't know for sure this is the answer for UTM, but I set the speed of the VM to 30% on my MacBook Air M4 during installation in QEMU and the install just completed successfully. Given the nature of this problem, I'm not sure if I got lucky or speed makes the race condition less likely to cause problems.

I'm guessing there is a way to set speed from the QEMU command-line, but I don't know how. I just use the Speed menu on Mac.

[mikoenig]

It took me maybe a dozen tries to find this out. One big part of the solution is hidden in one of changanmoon‘s screenshots.

In addition to the global hack (-global ide-device.win2k-install-hack=on), the CPU must be pentium-v1!
With these two options enabled I was able to reproducibly install Windows 2000 in the current UTM version (4.7.4).
After installation CPU can be set to Default and the global hack argument can be deleted.

[marcantoinegodde]

I had it working as well with pentium-v1 as well!
i386 architecture seems definitely required as stated in Qemu documentation and I also used the system definition pc-i440fx-10.0.

[cleanbit]

nothing helps here - tried setting CPU to pentium-v1 with global hack parameter, Win2K install always loops during Distributed Transaction Coordinator install with two different laptops (M1 Pro and M4 Max)

[ghost]

This is not how I solved this; I assigned two cores to the Virtual Machine, I left the CPU at default and I adjusted the RAM to 512MB. Tested with both Professional and Server and both successfully installed from scratch when new version of UTM was recently released [September?]. The only QEMU parameters I used was -boot menu=on

[cleanbit]

Thanks, setting to 2 CPU cores helped!

[ghost]

Great; I have my Windows VMs 'sysprepped', so if you do the same, you don't need to adjust the CPU cores if you decide to adjust these parameters post-setup (After sysprepping, I allocate one core and 256MB RAM so the clone VM inherits this specification)