Black Screen On XP Guest

Question

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I'm running Windows XP as guest on VMware Player 6.0.1, but I'm getting a black screen. The VM starts up, I see the XP logo screen as it loads, but then the welcome screen never appears.

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It's worth noting that this VM is running inside another VM running a Windows XP guest; the outer-host is Windows 8. Everything is responsive, I can move the innermost-machine window around, even resize it, but it won't display the welcome screen.

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According to ( Ubuntu 11.04 VM shows a black screen in VMware Player ) and ( Issue while loading vmware fusion 3.0 ), enabling hardware graphics acceleration may fix black-screen issues for some guests, but my VMs already have it enabled, and my screen doesn't start black, it goes black, so I don't think it's the same issue. I've also looked at ( Get black screen at logon/welcome? ), but as I've shown in my screenshot, adjusting the screen resolution of the guest doesn't help.

What is the problem here, and if it's fixable, how so?

Please, no harsh-comments along the lines of "don't run a VM in a VM!!!". I'm aware it's not a recommended activity, this is just for fun.

Solution

In the Virtual Machine Settings of the guest that is blank, under Hardware, Display, try turning off Accelerate 3D graphics.

When I have the box on, under Linux Mint 16 (ubuntu), the guest will be black on every screen except the main screen--unless I turn off the 3D acceleration as noted above.