VHD or raw partition of a Windoze fails to boot

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stws
Posts: 3
Joined: 21. Sep 2013, 12:15

VHD or raw partition of a Windoze fails to boot

Post by stws »

I'm trying to clone a physical Windoze labtop into Virtualbox 6.1.28 on an old Mac Pro 2008 running Catalina, but no luck so far.

Attempted to export the physical labtop's win10 128G ssd with systool Disk2vdh v.2.1, only it creates always 2 vhd files one large and a small <50MB, even when selecting only the C drive, neither when exporting using VHDx.
VBox always complains of not finding any boot volume when launching a VM with the large exported VHD attached.

Then I've tried to clone physical ssd from a terminal with dd if=/dev/ssdXs<C drive> of=/dev/NVMeXs<some partition#> and creating a raw vmdk pointing to NVMeXs<some partition> and permissions allowing my account access and VBox having "Use host I/O cache" checked, I'm getting the same error: FATAL: No bootable medium found! System halted.

Any hints appreciated!

TIA
mpack
Site Moderator
Posts: 39156
Joined: 4. Sep 2008, 17:09
Primary OS: MS Windows 10
VBox Version: PUEL
Guest OSses: Mostly XP

Re: VHD or raw partition of a Windoze fails to boot

Post by mpack »

stws wrote:I'm getting the same error: FATAL: No bootable medium found! System halted.
That probably means that the disk image is intended for a UEFI system, but you didn't enable EFI in the VM settings.

Disk2VHD should work provided you choose the entire drive, don't deselect any partitions (*). Also don't select any partitions that reside on other drives, and do not select the "Virtual PC" option.

(*) Unwanted partitions can be removed from the VM later.
stws
Posts: 3
Joined: 21. Sep 2013, 12:15

Re: VHD or raw partition of a Windoze fails to boot

Post by stws »

mpack wrote:
stws wrote:I'm getting the same error: FATAL: No bootable medium found! System halted.
That probably means that the disk image is intended for a UEFI system, but you didn't enable EFI in the VM settings.
Right U were... only it just boot into an UEFI shell (see attached SD) I find both FS0:EFI\Boot\bootx64.efi as well FS0:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgr.efi + bootmgfw.efi but not sure how to load these or how otherwise to bootstrap the Win10 on this FS0 image/file system...
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Screenshot 2021-11-07 at 22.24.16.png (62 KiB) Viewed 3875 times
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Screenshot 2021-11-07 at 22.39.12.png (32.83 KiB) Viewed 3875 times
stws
Posts: 3
Joined: 21. Sep 2013, 12:15

Re: VHD or raw partition of a Windoze fails to boot

Post by stws »

Ok, trying with these cmds:

Shell> FS0:
FS0> echo EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi > startup.nsh
startup.nsh

Above cmds worked!
mpack
Site Moderator
Posts: 39156
Joined: 4. Sep 2008, 17:09
Primary OS: MS Windows 10
VBox Version: PUEL
Guest OSses: Mostly XP

Re: VHD or raw partition of a Windoze fails to boot

Post by mpack »

I'm glad you got it working.
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