Getting help with BCE

Troubleshooting Tips

The most common problems across all types of laptops are:

  • Not enough free space on your hard drive
  • Not enough RAM system memory

There is tremendous variation between hardware across laptop manufacturers, and below we list the most common known problems and their solutions.

Apple Laptops

Most Apple laptops released in the last few years are capable of running BCE, however some older Apple laptops do not support the hardware virtualization required to run a Virtual machine.

PC Laptops

Is your Virtualization feature turned on?

While many recent PC laptops support hardware virtualization, some computer vendors disable this feature as shipped from the factory.

If you are familiar with changing settings in your system BIOS, you may try: Enabling Virtualization in your PC BIOS.

However, many older, and even some brand new, PC laptops do not support hardware virtualization at all.

Chromebooks, Netbooks, and ARM-based computers

You are likely to have problems if you try to use BCE on these kinds of machines.

Other possible issues

  • Check that you have the complete .ova file downloaded by comparing the file size on your computer to the information on our downloads page.
  • If you get a text-based screen with some wording about a UEFI shell, try clicking on the Settings tab for the Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager window and clicking on System. Under the Motherboard page, be sure that Enable EFI (special OSes only) is unchecked. Then click OK, and try to start the VM again.