VirtualBox Windows 10 OOBE Errors: OOBEREGION, OOBEZDP, OOBEKEYBOARD FIX

VirtualBox Windows 10 OOBE Errors: OOBEREGION, OOBEZDP, OOBEKEYBOARD FIX

Goals:
Set up VirtualBox
install Windows Server 2016 as a virtual machine on VirtualBox
Install Windows Enterprise as a virtual machine on VirtualBox
Create a Domain controller and a client machine.

Here is what happened:

I had just installed VirtualBox w/ Linux CentOS on a different more powerful Windows 10 laptop.

I moved on to install VirtualBox onto a windows 8.1 machine so I could create and install windows server 2016 for some active directory practice.

FAIL #1

During the windows enterprise 10 installation, I kept getting the OOBEZDP error message no matter how many times I clicked on Try Again.

FAIL #2

I found this alleged workaround to OOBEZDP:

“Click shift + F10 and then load Explorer.exe, click Win+X, click run then cmd.exe and then taskmgr. Finally, close Microsoft account In task manager and there’s windows 10”

I executed all that but then I got the OOBEREGION error message.

FAIL #3

Now I followed these steps from an user named Kari from this forum post:

https://www.tenforums.com/windows-insider/118225-insider-isos-cant-get-past-oobe-stage.html

“One thing that you could try is Sysprep, it is pretty good at fixing OOBE. When you come to region selection screen, press SHIFT + F10 to open Command Prompt and enter the following command:

%windir%\System32\Sysprep\sysprep.exe /oobe /reboot

This clears current GUIDs and SIDs, restarts the computer, and runs OOBE again. Takes a minute or so. I am not saying this resolves your issue, but it has done it for me quite often when OOBE for one or another reason cannot finish setting up Windows.”

Now I got the “OOBEKEYBOARD” error message message

FIX/SOLUTION
I saw many people struggling with this issue. Some people suggested increasing allocated Cpu’s to the Windows Virtual Machine. In my case I didn’t have any extra CPUs to give and it the option selector was greyed out. In the back of my mind I wondered if perhaps the actual computer desktop hardware could’t handle creating a Windows 10 64bit virtual machine.

Then I found a Youtube video in Spanish
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhiHRI13uW0

Good thing I can speak Spanish and can follow directions.
Description of steps. The actual steps are below this description
Step 1, you will be activating an Administrator account
Step 2, create your new user account. Choose an account name and password.
For the steps below we used username Test and password 4321.
Step 3, Add your newly created account “test” or whatever you chose to name it, to the Administrators group.
Step 4. Move to a different directory. After you execute the directory change the prompt should change to C:\Windows\System32\oobe
Step 5, Execute msoobe.exe

After this, it should load. Give it 10-15mins. During this time if you are waiting forever on the  “just a moment prompt you can move your mouse cursor up to the Top left corner And click on Machine>reset

ACTUAL STEPS
Click Shift + F10 to access CMD.
💾 CMD commands. 

1° net user administrator /active:yes

2° net user /add test 4321

3° net localgroup administrators test /add

4° cd %windir%\system32\oobe

5° msoobe.exe

Congratulations you installed Windows on your virtual machine.

Now that we have successfully installed Windows the next goals are to delete the Administrator account we created and the defaultser0 account.

Once Windows environment Homepage loaded successfully go to the start menu and Sign out of your account. 

Next, log back in with the user account you created, “test” and password “4321”

First, we delete the admin account through CMD with admin privileges:
Open CMD with Administrator privileges. And type and run:

net user administrator /active:no

After it runs you can exit and close out of CMD. To do this you can type: exit

Now we delete the defaultuser0 account:

Now go to Control Panel>User Account>Change account type.
Click on defaultuser0.
Click on Delete account. Follow thru all the “are you sure prompts”.

The last goal is to delete the defaultuser0 folder:

Go to your C: drive>Users>defaultuser0 and delete
Go to your Vms desktop and empty the trash bin.

Finally, you can restart your Windows VM and you have a clean Windows Install. YAY!