This is an error I encountered while running one of my virtual machines in VirtualBox.
From Stack Overflow, these were these ere three common culprits for the type of error the user is seeing:
- VT-x is not enabled in the BIOS
- The CPU doesn't support VT-x
- Hyper-V virtualization is enabled in Windows
Since the virtual machine used to run couple days ago and I am using a corporate managed machine, I suspected some security policies (GPO) have been pushed that restricted executing virtual machines. With that assumption, the first two factors (VT-x not enable or supported) can be ruled out. Then I checked if Hyper-V is enabled from Windows Features settings.
Since Hyper-V is not enabled, I had to research further what has restricted this virtual machine. Then I stumbled upon the discussion that this might be caused by Windows Defender Credential Guard. To disable this feature, I executed these set of commands in administrator level command prompt.
mountvol X: /s
copy %WINDIR%\System32\SecConfig.efi X:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\SecConfig.efi /Y
bcdedit /create {0cb3b571-2f2e-4343-a879-d86a476d7215} /d "DebugTool" /application osloader
bcdedit /set {0cb3b571-2f2e-4343-a879-d86a476d7215} path "\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\SecConfig.efi"
bcdedit /set {bootmgr} bootsequence {0cb3b571-2f2e-4343-a879-d86a476d7215}
bcdedit /set {0cb3b571-2f2e-4343-a879-d86a476d7215} loadoptions DISABLE-LSA-ISO
bcdedit /set {0cb3b571-2f2e-4343-a879-d86a476d7215} device partition=X:
mountvol X: /d
This would require a reboot of the machine for the features to be disable. I was prompted twice to press F3 to disable these security features.
After all startup settled in my machine, VirtualBox virtual machine was able to execute. Note that this can only be solved if you local administrative privilege on the machine.
Hope this helps others.
Hope this helps others.