Installing Windows 2000 in VirtualBox …

… does work exactly as numerous guides explain – or would have, if I hadn’t been to impatient: Using IDE controller may lead to a crash reboot on „Registering Components“ right after network configuration (as the VirtualBox manual cleary states) and it did crash reboot with me. The manual offers the solution:

These problems are all caused by a bug in the hard disk driver of Windows 2000. After issuing a hard disk request, there is a race condition […] The solution is to introduce an artificial delay before delivering such interrupts. This delay can be configured for a VM using the following command:

VBoxManage setextradata "VM name" "VBoxInternal/Devices/piix3ide/0/Config/IRQDelay" 1

This sets the delay to one millisecond. In case this doesn’t help, increase it to a value between 1 and 5 milliseconds.

Now for the impatient (me) setting it to „1“ first (still a reboot), then immediatly to „5“ (still a reboot!), and finally looking for other solutions elswhere – to no avail …

… because „increase it to a value between 1 and 5“ literally means to increase it: try „1“, try „2“, try „3“ and behold! it worked with „3“!