[Resolved] Physical drive to VHD: No bootable medium found

[Boriskarloff]

Hi to everyone. I need help.
I copied many times in VHDX, VHD (with Microsoft utility) and VMDK format (with VMware-converter), a bootable physical hard disk (1tb) with Windows 8.1 64bit.
I tried to use the generated file with Virtualbox (and VMWare) and nothing to do.
I converted with command line vboxmanage the VHD in VDI. Same problem.
Always the message Fatal! No bootable medium found! System halted.
It is not the first time I use Virtualbox and I know how it works.

Is there something I can try?
Thanks for every help.

My pc has Windows 10 64bit
Installed Virtualbox 64bit

[mpack]

"I tried to use the file" gives us nothing to go on. How did you try to use the file? Your description of how to created the virtual disk is important too. Not all methods result in bootable media, and no method exists if physical disk was not bootable.

[Boriskarloff]

Thanks for reply. I've update my question...

[socratis]

I've update my question...

And I've changed the title from the generic "It is driving me crazy" to something more appropriate that describes the problem, not your mindset

Did you convert the whole disk, or just a partition?

[Boriskarloff]

All the disk

[socratis]

@Boriskarloff
This is not Twitter, there is no limit of 140 characters. We need you to describe completely and in full detail, step-by-step, exact commands, exact procedures of what you did. Otherwise we're in the dark.

So, start telling the story of the conversion and the attempt to boot it. Not "I converted it, it won't boot". That's not enough. We need the full and completely detailed steps.

[mpack]

Some basic facts that I can tell you about, based on what you've said so far.

• The error message "No bootable medium found" means exactly what it says and is never wrong. No bootable media is attached to the VM.
• Copying the content of the disk from one container to another (VHD to VMDK to VDI) makes no difference. Only the content of the drive - and whether you actually connected it to the VM - determines whether the VM can boot from that drive.

I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark and guess: you imaged a GPT (UEFI) drive, and connected it to a legacy BIOS in the VM. That could be why it isn't finding bootable partitions. VirtualBox does have an EFI BIOS option, but it wasn't designed to boot Windows 8.1, so you may have a struggle on your hands. Or, you can look for a tool that can convert the partition map on the drive from GPT to MBR. I think that should be possible given that the drive is only 1TB.

[socratis]

VirtualBox does have an EFI BIOS option, but it wasn't designed to boot Windows 8.1

Slight correction; anything greater than Windows 7 can boot with the VirtualBox provided EFI, according to ch. 3.14 Alternative Firmware (EFI).

[Boriskarloff]

Hi to everyone tried to help me.
Today I tried again and now it works! I don't know why
I just enabled EFI, but... I made it before time and time again.

I'd like to understand the reason, for help others have the same problem.

Bye.

[mpack]

I'd like to understand the reason, for help others have the same problem.

We would all like a better understanding of the problem, but information flow so far doesn't give me great optimism on that score.

One thing you could do now that you can get the VM to boot, is go to Disk Management in the Win10 guest and look at the properties of the system drive (usually disk 0). If the first partition is a few hundred MB "EFI System Partition" then yes, you needed the EFI BIOS. If the first partition is much larger then it's an MBR drive and EFI was a red herring.

[Boriskarloff]

Yes it is EFI.
But as I wrote in the previous post, I enabled in VirtualBox many times, for try.

[socratis]

People try different things to make a VM work. Usually, it's not just a single thing that they change, they start changing setting at will, blindly. Since we don't have any logs of what the VM settings were when it wasn't booting, we can't tell for sure.

The important thing is that is works now. Maybe you finally picked the appropriate settings. All's well that ends well. Marking as [Resolved].