Respectfully, you and I are basing our feedback on incomplete information. That being said, it absolutely could be a hardware problem because the further get into the boot process, more data is loaded from disk into RAM. There isn’t some point beyond which hardware is no longer a concern.

Your point about dmesg is a valid one, provided you can even get to a login prompt. Otherwise, you’re captive to the terminal output on boot.

I reserve the right to be wrong, but my money is on bad RAM. If one wants to test the hardware without taking things apart, booting to a live USB/CD is a good option.

This seems like a hardware problem. Hardware freezes would not be caused by hardware pass through to VMs. Test your RAM. Check for loose PCI cards, etc.