Hey all,
I've tried searching but, haven't found anything relevant to my situation. But that might be because I'm a virtualization newbie and don't fully understand it.
I have a Windows 10 laptop using UEFI. I've made a VHD of the hard drive using Disk2VHD. I have a host laptop, using BIOS, and running Windows 10. I'm trying to get the VHD I made from the UEFI laptop to run as a guest on the BIOS laptop, but it won't boot. I get an error about "can't find media". I can turn on the "Enable EFI" setting on the VM, but that boots into a shell that I can't get out of.
Is what I'm trying to do possible? I'm guessing maybe a BIOS host can't run a UEFI guest, but I can't seem to find the answer.
Thanks,
Joe
Boot uefi vhd on bios computer
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Re: Boot uefi vhd on bios computer
99.999% that's where things didn't go as planned. For example, if you selected just a partition and not the whole disk.Joe Thompson wrote: I've made a VHD of the hard drive using Disk2VHD.
That's not the whole error, is it?Joe Thompson wrote: I get an error about "can't find media".
As you should. Your Win10 was setup to boot from EFI, it won't boot with a BIOS setting.Joe Thompson wrote: I can turn on the "Enable EFI" setting on the VM
That's because it can't find any bootable media. See the first point.Joe Thompson wrote:that boots into a shell that I can't get out of.
Depends. Hard to say with that information alone. It's definitely doable.Joe Thompson wrote:Is what I'm trying to do possible?
No, that's not it. It's a virtulization software, so that is definitely possible. What makes your host sing, has absolutely nothing what makes your guest sing...Joe Thompson wrote: I'm guessing maybe a BIOS host can't run a UEFI guest
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Do NOT reply with the "QUOTE" button, please use the "POST REPLY", at the bottom of the form.
If you obfuscate any information requested, I will obfuscate my response. These are virtual UUIDs, not real ones.
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Re: Boot uefi vhd on bios computer
Some physical PC non-EFI BIOSes can still recognize and boot from a GPT partitioned disk, but AFAIK the VirtualBox BIOS doesn't support this. You have to be in EFI mode for the VirtualBox BIOS to recognize GPT.Joe Thompson wrote:I'm guessing maybe a BIOS host can't run a UEFI guest, but I can't seem to find the answer.
As to why it goes to the shell... Frankly I've not had a lot of luck with VirtualBox EFI. I recently installed a Linux from scratch under EFI, worked fine... but next day it was booting to the shell. It required a modification to the boot script to fix it.
You might like to look into tools to convert GPT disks into MBR disks. If the drive has a logical size <2TB then it should be possible. You'd want the tool on a bootable recovery CD.