Why does booting Fedora 17 (and 18) into virtualbox from a live cd fail?

Solution 1:

You're processor does support 64-bit OS's natively (CPU specs).

My understanding is that you're saying you are running Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit.

The ISO name "Fedora-17-x86_64-Live-Desktop.iso" points out that the Fedora version is 64-bit (x86_64).

You can't run a 64-bit VirtualBox guest on a 32-bit host OS unless you processor supports both 64-bit instructions (which yours does) and hardware virtualization (which yours does not). Related info from VirtualBox

So, either run a 32-bit (i386) of Fedora in the VM, or replace your host OS (Windows) version with a 64-bit version, or upgrade your CPU to one that supports both 64-bit and hardware virtualization.