Windows 10 guest OS stuck booting in Virtualbox on Ubuntu 16.04 host

Microsoft offers these downloadable virtual machine images for cross-browser testing (IE8-IE11 and Edge). My host OS is Ubuntu 16.04 (64-bit) and I'm running Virtualbox 5.0.40_Ubuntu r115130.

The problem I experience is that loading two of the images Win10 stable and also the Win10 preview (after having successfully imported the appliances) gets stuck at the start screen. My host OS shows one CPU core fully utilized, so it's likely a CPU bottleneck, right?

After about a quarter of an hour, still no progress here.

At importing the appliance I left everything as it was preconfigured (4096MB memory, 1 CPU, etc.). Is there any "trick" to overcome this?

I have had the same problem.

I fixed it by changing the Virtualbox Setting -> System -> Acceleration -> Paravirtualization Interface and selecting KVM instead of "default".

Now boot Window 10 again and it should boot.

You may select "none" but the performance is so much slower.

FYI: I have the same version of virtualbox 5.0.40_Ubuntu r115130 and upgraded to windows 10 1709.

I had a similar problem. I'm running Linux Mint 18.1 x64 (based off 16.04 Xenial) and VirtualBox 5.0.32. I have a full/real version (not the IE tester version) of Windows 10 that was running fine in VB as installed from the ISO. This was version 1511 (build 10586).

I then tried to update to version 1703 (build 15063) and experienced exactly the same behaviour that you've described. The solution for me was to update the version of VirtualBox to 5.1.22, the latest at the time of writing. 5.0.32 was the latest available in the Ubuntu repository so I had to install the newer version from the VirtualBox apt repo as described at https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads#Debian-basedLinuxdistributions:

Add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian yakkety contrib

According to your distribution, replace 'yakkety' by 'xenial', 'vivid', 'utopic', 'trusty', 'raring', 'quantal', 'precise', 'lucid', 'jessie', 'wheezy', or 'squeeze'. ... The Oracle public key for apt-secure can be downloaded...and register[ed]:

wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox_2016.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -
wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -

...snip...

To install VirtualBox, do

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install virtualbox-5.1

...snip...

Note: Ubuntu/Debian users might want to install the dkms package...through the following command:

sudo apt-get install dkms

Once I updated VirtualBox, I performed the update in the guest and after restart I almost instantly saw the white dot spinner appear on the black screen with the cyan windows logo (that you've attached) as you'd expect.