VM won't load after zypper dup to 13.1

English Virtualization
1

Recently upgraded from 12.3 to 13.1 using zypper dup method. Have had no
issues for the past week since, but today I tried to use virtualbox for the
first time since the upgrade. The virtualbox program opened OK, but the VM
(Win 7) would not. I discovered that one minor dependency was missing and
installed that, but the problem persists.

Here’s the error message:

Failed to open a session for the virtual machine W7-64.

VT-x features locked or unavailable in MSR. (VERR_VMX_MSR_LOCKED_OR_DISABLED).

Result Code: NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005)
Component: Console
Interface: IConsole {db7ab4ca-2a3f-4183-9243-c1208da92392}

virtualbox version is 4.2.18-2.5.1-x86-64 from openSUSE-13.1-Update

:~ # uname -a
Linux p580.cutbeach 3.11.6-4-desktop #1 SMP PREEMPT Wed Oct 30 18:04:56 UTC 2013 
(e6d4a27) x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
2

VERR_VMX_MSR_LOCKED_OR_DISABLED normally indicates that hardware virtualization is disabled in the BIOS settings.
So have a look there and enable it if it’s disabled.

3

Thanx wolfi323

That was it. I forgot that I’d recently flashed the BIOS to resolve an unrelated issue.

(Of course, as luck would have it, the new BIOS is flaky and the machine locks up 4 out of every 5 times I go into the configuration screen, so changing the virtualization setting from “disabled” to “enabled” took a lot of patience. Not Lenovo’s finest hour. Now I can’t even flash the BIOS again. That would require Windows, and Windows refuses to load, as it thinks the new BIOS software is a new machine. I’ll have to fix that next.)