not booting guest windows 7

Discussions about using Windows guests in VirtualBox.
faustf
Posts: 15
Joined: 3. Dec 2014, 13:54

not booting guest windows 7

Post by faustf »

hi guys i have a physical pc with windows 7 i cloned the physical disk with disk2vhd.exe and i created a vhd file i tried to hook the virtual disk to a windows 7 64 bit 4gb ram machine, but if not septum bios EFI does not start , if I septum EFI starts but gives me a shell see my link https://ibb.co/CBZ3h25
anyone can help me ??
i look in internet but i find solution only if i have guest linux thanks at all
scottgus1
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Re: not booting guest windows 7

Post by scottgus1 »

You are trying a Physical to Virtual, or P2V. Websearch:

"Windows 7 P2V {your error} site:forums.virtualbox.org"

for how others have solved your problem.

Genreally, if the original PC booted with EFI the VM should be on EFI too. If it was legact BIOS, then the VM should also use legacy BIOS. If the hard drive in the old PC was IDE, then the VM hard drive should use IDE. If the hard drive in the old PC was SATA, then the VM hard drive should use SATA.

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Images should be cropped and resized to get under the forum's 128kB size limit yet remain readable, then posted using the forum's Upload Attachment tab. This is possible from first day first post.

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faustf
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Joined: 3. Dec 2014, 13:54

Re: not booting guest windows 7

Post by faustf »

thanks for reply , yes i try to p2v i tryed to websearch but find different problem than me
in phisical machine have windows 7 AHCI (in ssd HDD), and UEFI on , i set in virtualbox EFI and in sata AHCI with solid state drive
return me problem in pci i suppose but ask at expert if possible i attach a photo
Attachments
shel efi.jpg
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mpack
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Re: not booting guest windows 7

Post by mpack »

faustf wrote:in phisical machine have windows 7 AHCI (in ssd HDD), and UEFI on
Are you sure about that last part? AFAIK Win7 was not able to boot from a GPT drive, nor use most other features of UEFI. Most Win7 physical installs will use MBR (a.k.a. legacy BIOS).
faustf
Posts: 15
Joined: 3. Dec 2014, 13:54

Re: not booting guest windows 7

Post by faustf »

if i unset efi bios return me fatal error unable booting the VM in bios in phisical machine i have UEFI enable but have also Legacy Enable i think can do both
mpack
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Re: not booting guest windows 7

Post by mpack »

faustf wrote:in phisical machine i have UEFI enable but have also Legacy Enable i think can do both
If you mean that your physical UEFI BIOS can emulate a legacy BIOS for the purpose of booting Win7 then that is not how you'd do it in a VM. You would simply not enable EFI.

Please give details of the error you get with an MBR boot.
faustf
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Joined: 3. Dec 2014, 13:54

Re: not booting guest windows 7

Post by faustf »

when disable efi inVM return Fatal: No bootable medium found! system halted .
and dont boot
mpack
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Re: not booting guest windows 7

Post by mpack »

Now you have me doubting that you even have a Win7 guest, because the symptoms you describe match the effect of attempting to boot a GPT drive with an MBR BIOS, but AFAIK a Win7 boot drive can't be GPT.

Can you please:
  1. Download the CloneVDI tool and unpack into a handy folder.
  2. Run CloneVDI and load your VDI.
  3. Click the "Partition Info..." button and post a screenshot of the resulting "Virtual Disk Partition Information" dialog box.
faustf
Posts: 15
Joined: 3. Dec 2014, 13:54

Re: not booting guest windows 7

Post by faustf »

i think is GPT
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mpack
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Re: not booting guest windows 7

Post by mpack »

Thanks, and here is my Win10 VM for comparison.
Capture.PNG
Capture.PNG (86.45 KiB) Viewed 4638 times
I see a number of differences, mainly to do with the alignment of the partitions (later windows use 2048 sector boundaries), but the attributes are different plus CloneVDI has not recognized any of your partitions (it put nothing in the "Name" column).

I think you have a Win7 drive, but it was never bootable and still isn't. You must have booted from some other drive, or a USB stick perhaps. This would explain why you have Win7 on a GPT drive.

Or a third party boot manager which isn't on that Win7 drive.
faustf
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Re: not booting guest windows 7

Post by faustf »

but is possible resolve ?
mpack
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Re: not booting guest windows 7

Post by mpack »

faustf wrote:but is possible resolve ?
To be honest, I don't see how. If the disk was ever bootable then you could boot from a Win7 setup DVD and repair the boot info. However I don't believe this disk was ever bootable. You would need to understand how it ever booted in the past (if it ever did), and set up a similar apparatus in the VM.
 Edit:  p.s. I misremembered where those partition labels (e.g. "Basic data partition") came from. I assumed I must look up the GUID and display that name if I find a match, but in fact the partition name is encoded in the partition table itself - CloneVDI is simply reporting it verbatim.

Also, I looked up the meaning of those partition attributes. 0x8000000000000000 means that the partition will not presented to the user, i.e. in Windows the partition will not be assigned a drive letter. This would be the norm for boot manager and other hidden partitions. Partitions with attribute 0x0 should all be assigned drive letters, and that doesn't really make sense in your case.

In your case I am seeing the standard GUID values for EFI system partition and Microsoft private partition, but there are a couple of unexpected partitions before it.

Basically, I stand by my assumption that this drive was never intended to be bootable, and cannot easily be made so. I would not surprise me if the EFI and MS partitions are blank, like the partition names. This drive was probably formatted using GPT for other reasons, e.g. to beat the 2TB size barrier, but was always a secondary or even removable drive. 
mpack
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Re: not booting guest windows 7

Post by mpack »

And in case someone else recommends the following (e.g. it keeps occurring to me, and I have to keep disregarding the idea): if this was Win10 with damaged partitions then I might suggest creating a new Win10 installation and then overwriting the user (data) partitions with the ones from your backup.

However that will not work here because it's not Win10, it's Win7. And, as I've mentioned several times, AFAIK you can't boot Win7 from a GPT drive.
pt58
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Re: not booting guest windows 7

Post by pt58 »

I can confirm that Windows 7 64 bit can indeed boot in EFI mode on real hardware (I've just checked it on a real PC), hence it's entirely possible that the original hard disk did boot Win 7 in EFI mode.

The problem comes in that the the EFI implementation in Virtualbox is unable to boot Win 7.

Section 3.14 of the User manual states:
Note that the Oracle VM VirtualBox EFI support is experimental and will be enhanced as
EFI matures and becomes more widespread. Mac OS X, Linux, and newer Windows guests are
known to work fine. Windows 7 guests are unable to boot with the Oracle VM VirtualBox EFI
implementation.

One possible solution I can think of is to create a Macrium Reflect image of the original hard disk and then restore it into a Virtualbox VDI in MBR mode.
There are tutorials on the Macrium website covering this conversion from a UEFI(GPT) disk to an MBR disk.

Of course, you may still run into the usual issues surrounding any P2V conversion, such as hard disk driver issues and losing activation.
mpack
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Re: not booting guest windows 7

Post by mpack »

Well.. I said Win7 does not support a GPT boot drive, not that Win7 does not tolerate an UEFI BIOS. GPT and UEFI are related, but they are not at all the same thing.

This Wikipedia article casts some light perhaps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table, and according to it, Win7-64bit supports GPT (with a UEFI BIOS), Win7-32bit does not. This is not my understanding, but we can set that aside.

But the OPs partitions still look wrong for a bootable drive. Plus we have the fact that the EFI BIOS doesn't recognize it as a bootable drive.

Good news is that that article also lists a bunch of well known GPT partition UUIDs. It looks like "{E3C9.... " is Microsoft Reserved Partition. A recovery partition perhaps?

So where are we? If it is correct that Win7-64bit accepts GPT boot drives, and if the OP is talking about Win7-64bit, then it may be possible to apply the trick I mentioned above: create a similar VM and then copy over the data partition (OP's partition 3).
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