Windows 10 Sandbox: “No hypervisor was found” Solution

When you attempt to launch Windows Sandbox for the first time, if you receive an error that states “No hypervisor was found”, not to worry! The hypervisor is necessary to run virtual machines and most likely is not set to run on startup or is disabled in the BIOS. This was a problem I experienced in January 2022. To fix this issue, I did the following three steps below.

STEP 1:

First, check to see if CPU virtualization is enabled. Open task manager (Ctrl + Shift + Esc), then head to the Performance tab. If Virtualization is disabled, then restart your machine, loading into the BIOS and activate this feature from there.

STEP 2:

If virtualization is enabled, then add a Boot Configuration Data (BCD) entry to configure the hypervisor to run at startup. To do this, Open command prompt as an administrator (type Command Prompt in the start menu). In the terminal, copy and paste the following command and press Enter:

BCDEDIT /Set {current} hypervisorlaunchtype auto

Restart your computer.

STEP 3:

Open another elevated Command Prompt terminal and copy and paste the following, then press Enter:

BCDEDIT

At the bottom of the list, you should see hypervisorlaunchtype set to Auto.

We have now successfully configured hypervisor to run at startup!