[fabco]

This is an old thread, but having just installed win10, and virtualbox on an old sony vaio laptop and wasting several days on it, i can report it can indeed be done.

My laptop was a vaio vgafw280j. The biggest problem was lack of hardware virtualization support in the bios. I wasted most of my time figuring out this was causing the guru meditation crash of virtualbox when attempting to load protools.
Sony finally issued a bios update for many of their models that fixes this.

So, step 1 is update your bios and enable hardware virtualization on the processor.

My protools was version 8, which was the last version that supports my antique mbox1 and only runs on obsolete win xp.

So step 2 is to install win10 and verify it sees hardware virtualization in control panel/system/processors. Install latest virtualbox and matching guest extensions. Setup shared folder between guest and host for service pack files etc that you will need for installing xp. Install guest extensions into your virtualxp space only after setting up win10 share or it won't show up in virtual.

Step 3 is to install xp, and service pack3 into virtualbox. Protools 8 only required sp2, but I couldn't find sp2, and i can confirm sp3 works fine.

Step4, windows update xp to its final standards.

Step5, turn off all power saving in both win0 and xp, screen saver, virus checkers, windows defender, and uninstall ie8. You had to install ie8 to use windows update. Ie8 crashes protools with application failed to install msg. Check that system/dep data exception hardware is still defaulted to windows only.

Step6, in virtualbox settings/system/ motherboard check box for i/o acpi, and in system/processor check enable pae/nx. You wont be able to do this if you didnt get hardware virtualization enabled in your bios.

Step7, load protools. Prob good to do some virtual machine snapshots at various stages, especially this one before running ptools. Protools may hang on a plugin and then refuse to run again without reinstall. Nice to restore snapshots to save that hassle.

At this point i had to get rid of all plugins to save time loading because my core 2 duo could only devote one core to ptools. Very slow. But it did come up authorize and load sessions ok.

Probably need at least 4 cores to make this a viable daw system. However i can successfully report protools 8 does work in a virtualbox inside win10 with a legacy mbox1 if anyone is still interested.