Moving Guest OS from Windows to OSX

[heffneil]

I have successfully installed Windows 7 as a guest OS in a Windows 7 Host environment. When I boot the system up I get a Windows Recovery Error. I just moved the VDI file and selected it for the new instance on the OSX Machine. I am running the latest virtualbox versions on each host. I have successfully stopped and started the guest OS on the windows machine. I even copied machine state with the VDI but it doesn't show on the new Host OS.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Neil

[mpack]

Copying bare VDIs around is not a good idea if you can avoid it. See the "Howto" forum for how to move a VM, but adapt it to the case of different hosts, i.e. you may need to edit the .vbox file to remove any Windows specific path and device names. It is especially important to move the VM properly with a Win7 VM, because creating a new VM around the existing VDI will lead to activation problems. Moving to a different CPU: possible activation problem. Using same CD key for both physical and virtual: potential activation problem.

[heffneil]

Im a newb to this for sure but fairly computer adept. I looked at the how-to with Win7 host and guest and there are numerous linux commands which make little sense to me in this environment. I also so someone talking in another thread about exporting and adding a new machine which sounds like what I was trying to do but different host OS's seems to make that more complex yet I don't see some tool to make the necessary adjustments. Perhaps I was naive but I thought the idea of this program was to make it pretty hardware agnostic. The virtualbox OS performs some hardware emulation so that regardless of the host OS the guest OS thinks it is the same? Is my assumption incorrect?

[mpack]

The howto I was referring to doesn't do any command line stuff as I recall.

You can also try export/import, but that has problems in that it changes the VM in several ways, which again may result in a Windows guest needing reactivation.

Yes, if you have the VM configured correctly on each host (which is the purpose of this thread) then the guest will not know - except for the CPU. VirtualBox is a hypervisor, not a simulator, so guest code runs natively on the host CPU and can therefore see the CPU ID and capabilities.

[rpmurray]

Yes, if you have the VM configured correctly on each host (which is the purpose of this thread) then the guest will not know - except for the CPU. VirtualBox is a hypervisor, not a simulator, so guest code runs natively on the host CPU and can therefore see the CPU ID and capabilities.

You can use VBoxManage to modify the CPUID information that is presented to the guest.

[mpack]

You can use VBoxManage to modify the CPUID information that is presented to the guest.

Within practical constraints yes, but it still isn't something I'd care to do.

[Jathter]

I’ve been using VirtualBox to run Windows apps in OS X for a year or so now, and love it. I started out with Parallels, but didn’t want to pay so much to upgrade. My Windows needs are few, but when you need it, you need it, and VirtualBox does the job.