Windows XP off an Existing Partition

nuudles · Post by **nuudles** » 6. Jun 2007, 16:56

Thank you very much for the 1.4.0 release. This release was the one I was waiting for, as I am trying to get VirtualBox to boot my Windows XP installation off of an existing partition. So far, I have this working pretty well using VMplayer, but I was hoping to take advantage of the hardware VT capabilities of the laptop I'm using. Using the same setup as my VMplayer and the same VMware disk image, I can boot up into grub, but whenever I try to boot into Windows, I see a bunch of random characters show up (shown below) and nothing else happens. When I got it working in VMware, I went through the blue screen process and ended up installing all the generic IDE and SATA drivers into Windows. I couldn't find any other way to add an existing partition in VirtualBox other than using a VMware disk image.

You can get the VMDK file here.

Thanks for your help

achimha · Post by **achimha** » 6. Jun 2007, 18:31

Does the VBox process have write permission to /dev/sda?

nuudles · Post by **nuudles** » 6. Jun 2007, 18:39

achimha wrote:Does the VBox process have write permission to /dev/sda?

Yes, I'm currently running VirtualBox as root. In addition, my normal user is part of the disk group:

brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 0 Jun 6 12:38 /dev/sda

nuudles · Post by **nuudles** » 7. Jun 2007, 15:05

As a test, I've also created a vmdk using VBoxManage with the following command:

Code: Select all

[root@localhost vbox]# VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename windows.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/sda
VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 1.4.0
(C) 2005-2007 innotek GmbH
All rights reserved.

RAW host disk access VMDK file windows.vmdk created successfully.

This vmdk file produced the same results. Any suggestions I can use to further debug the problem?

nuudles · Post by **nuudles** » 13. Jun 2007, 19:13

I'm still having this problem. Does anyone have any suggestions?