Problem with debian

[Belialbestial]

Hello!

First of all introduce myself, my name is Rodrigo, and I am new to this forum, I searched on other topics, the forum but have not managed to solve my problem.
It happens that I have an image of a hard drive, format .vdi which has a partition with windows 7 and Debian partition, both on x64, when I create a virtual machine that is to work with Debian, using this .vdi image when starting the virtual machine, only windows starts, and does not show the option to boot debian, physical partition the OS debian have installed the GRUB program so you should be able to give me choose if I want to leave with debian or at least recognize the partitions. I'm not very expert in the field of working with virtual machines, I ask for your help, of course waaaaay thanks !!

[mpack]

It may help to know how was this VDI created?

It sounds like it was imaged from a physical dual boot PC, and it was then converted to VDI - how?

[Belialbestial]

Hi mpack!

with a software tool "paragon" .vdi made a disk image, the method that I made was to place the physical disk in slave mode on a PC, and with this software to create an image that contained the entire contents of the disc to keep all the properties of the partitions.

primary partition containing Windows 7, and having debian partition appears as an extended partition.

it is assumed that if I make this procedure should start the virtual machine as you would in the physical pc?

[mpack]

Yes, in principle the Win7 boot manager should give you the same boot choices that it gave you on a physical machine.

However... I don't know the details of how Windows 7 identifies the drive to be booted. The act of cloning the physical drive to a VDI will have changed the disk UUID, and this may cause Win7 to stop recognizing the drive and perhaps return to default behaviour. Or, perhaps the Paragon disk imager edits the boot manager data to cater for the new UUID, but doesn't handle dual boot properly. This isn't something I've ever needed, but I assume there must exist some kind of application/tool for inspecting the Win7 boot manager configuration.

You could try imaging the whole disk again, using Disk2VHD. This definitely will not edit the boot manager data. Unfortunately VHD is an awful format, so before use I would convert the VHD to VDI using CloneVDI.

Or you could simply delete the Linux partition from this VM, and create a new Linux-only VM. Apart from training purposes, there aren't many good reasons to use dual boot in a VM.

[Belialbestial]

thank you very much, I will try to do what tells me when I tell them get results as I was!!