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I have a Lenovo Y50-70 laptop with 16 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD running Windows 10 Home Edition 64-bit.

I want to install a Windows 7 Professional 64-bit guest in my VirtualBox.

As the laptop doesn't come with an internal DVD drive, I created an ISO from the Win7 installation DVD, and stored it in my Documents folder.

In order to install a 64-bit OS, I've enabled Virtualization in the BIOS.

I've created the new Virtual Machine with the default settings: 2 GB RAM provided, 32 GB dynamic space for the VDI.
When I run it for the first time, it asks me for the start-up disk.
I browse to select the Windows 7 ISO file I just created.

But then a "FATAL: No bootable medium found! System halted." error message appears. See "Win7-2018-03-06-14-09-20-No-EFI" log file.
When I open the Virtual Machine settings, the "Acceleration" tab shows the "Enable VT-x/AMD-V" and "Enable Nested Paging" check boxes are checked.

I then go to the "Motherboard" tab, and see that the "Enable EFI" check box is unchecked, so I check that option.

I start the Virtual Machine again, and I get an UEFI Interactive Shell.
It indicates mapping table with BLK0 and BLK1, then a Shell prompt, and now I'm lost. See "Win7-2018-03-06-14-18-23-EFI" log file.

Is this the correct way to load the Windows ISO installer? What should I do next?

For future reference you should ZIP your logs. It helps save a (virtual) tree or two...

No bootable medium means exactly that. Your ISO is not bootable. I don't know how you created the ISO, but simply copying the files from the Win7 installation medium to an "ISO", does not make it bootable. You need a 1-to-1 copy of the medium.

Plus, don't enable EFI, that won't help you. Stick with the defaults.

For Windows hosts, I have found the best tool for creating ISO images either from a physical disk or from a directory of files is ISO Recorder. It has come in handy many a time when trying to get files into a VM.

-Andy.

socratis wrote:For future reference you should ZIP your logs. It helps save a (virtual) tree or two...

No bootable medium means exactly that. Your ISO is not bootable. I don't know how you created the ISO, but simply copying the files from the Win7 installation medium to an "ISO", does not make it bootable. You need a 1-to-1 copy of the medium.

Plus, don't enable EFI, that won't help you. Stick with the defaults.

Didn't work.

I created an ISO with ISO Recorder, and still have the same issue: No bootable medium found.
I'm able to open the ISO file and execute the installation file without problems, but somehow VirtualBox doesn't recognize the ISO as a bootable media.

I disabled EFI, ran the virtual machine, and nothing.

Went to the BIOS, disabled virtualization, created a new 32 bit virtual machine, selected the ISO when VirtualBox asked for the startup-disk, started the virtual machine, and still get the same error message.

Once again, I want to highlight the difference between having a bunch of files, and having a bunch of files in the correct place. That's why I said

VirtualPete wrote:simply copying the files from the Win7 installation medium to an "ISO", does not make it bootable

And it doesn't matter what tool you use. If your source isn't bootable, you can't make a bootable copy.<sup>[1]


[1]</sup>: You could but that's not your problem, neither the forum.

Oh I see.
I had to re-create the ISO file with a bootable option. It took me some time to do a research online as it was not as straightforward as I tought.

Thanks for the help!!

Great, thanks for the feedback. And thank you for marking the topic as [Solved]...
Although, we typically edit the first post and mark it as [Solved], since that's the one showing in the topics list and in the search engines. I'll do it, don't worry...