Win8 Bootcamp Paritition and Virtual Box

[solomani]

Hi all,

Is virtual-box able to boot from a windows 8.1 64bit partition under Mavericks? I followed a windows 7 tutorial and all works fine except when I boot the partition with Virtual Box it complains their is no Boot Media.

Thanks in advance!

[noteirak]

If you are doing raw device mapping, this is an experimental feature and you should know what you are doing. If properly configured, there is no reason for it not to work.

[solomani]

Actually, I rebooted into windows and I got the same error so its not Virtual Box itself. Though the process of mapping (I guess) caused the problem. Will play some more. Thanks.

[MxS]

Hi !
You're not alone !
I have the same issue !
Maverick + VirtualBox 4.3.2 + windows 8.1 created via the bootcamp assistant

No boot device message on the machine launch in virtual box

Playing with the CHMOD to create a raw disk (following the instructions of the Windows 7 Bootcamp virtualization) make my bootcamp assistant unable to recognize the partition it initially creates.

Nevertheless, the dual boot works, Windows 8.1 is working on the bootcamp partition and I also try Parallels (free trial) which can launch the bootcamp into a virtual machine.

Do you have an idea to launch the bootcamp partition through virtual box with these new OS ?

(I also just have tested the .hds files to .hdd from the parallels packages, even on VB 4.3.3 it fails !)

[MxS]

Hi !

I think I have an idea !
I saw a difference in my windows 8 bootcamp vs the tutorial with windows 7 bootcamp.
The win7 is based on disk0s4. Looks like my windows8 is on disk0s5 with maverick.

Unfortunately, due to these issues, I delete my bootcamp partition and I will use my windows 8 on a virtual machine only. During the deletion process (I made it manually) I saw this number of partition 0s5 instead of the 0s4.
It's strange because I made the same check (in terminal type "df -h" to see the partitions and their use) and bootcamp was really on disk0s4...

Hope this helps !

max

PS : I wrote a shell bash to create the raw file. Change the directories and the names of these files (same as win 7 tutorials)

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash
sudo chmod 777 /dev/disk0 /dev/disk0s4
diskutil unmount /Volumes/BOOTCAMP
sudo VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -rawdisk /dev/disk0 -filename /Users/YOUR_USER_HERE/VirtualBox\ VMs/bootcamp.vmdk -partitions 4
sudo chown YOUR_USER_HERE /Users/YOUR_USER_HERE/VirtualBox\ VMs/*.vmdk

If you don't understand my english, feel free to ask ! English is not my native language !

[JimBushWhack]

If you have followed the tutorial at viewtopic.php?f=8&t=48704&start=15, then you will see that I was never able to get a 64bit win7 bootcamp partition to work correctly under VBox scaffolding. Some folks claimed that they did have success at this, but I never have. I would expect that Win8 64bit might have similar problems. As far as Mavericks changing your hard disk partitioning, I have updated to Mavericks on all of my Macs and they still have only 4 partitions as they did under Lion and Mountain Lion. You can check this by bringing up Utilities->Disk Utility and then select your main Hard Drive. You should see the partitioning laid out as EFI, Macintosh HD, Recovery HD and BOOTCAMP.

[dempax]

Any luck anyone? I am on MBP late 2013 with a Win8.1 64-bit bootcamp partition, ntfs formatted. It works very well when using in bootcamp mode but no luck from vbox. After having followed the usual guide and double-checked steps, when starting in VBOX the Win launch is halted with error msg "FATAL: Could not read from the boot medium! System halted.".

I will keep looking...

[dempax]

I did not find solution and wonder if I need to switch to Parallels to use Win 8.1 bootcamp partition in a window together with OSX 10.9... (No issues using Win 7 bootcamp partition with vbox)

[samuelg0rd0n]

The same issue here guys I followed the guide on truongtx.me but when I boot up I get the message "FATAL: No bootable medium found! System halted.". At first, I thought it could be the FileVault 2 encryption but it's apparently not the case.

[dempax]

Doesn't seem to work with VBox version 4.3.8 either.

[StC]

HI,

I have succeeded in getting my Windows 8.1 partition to boot with VirtualBox 4.3.12.

What did the trick was remembering that my install is EFI-based and there was no way I was going to create a valid MBR in the vmdk. So what I did was:
- follow the instructions for creating a vmdk, but include the EFI partition (/dev/disk0s1) in addition to the Windows partition (/dev/disk0s4)
- tell VirtualBox that my virtual machine is EFI-based. I did it using the command line, but I guess that checking the EFI checkbox in the System configuration panel would have worked as well.

Result: I am now the happy owner of a virtual machine that boots a perfectly functional Windows 8.1. Er, no. Actually, the screen is 100% black. Still, I know the machine has booted because the beeps I hear when clicking around are characteristic Win8 beeps

I applied the same technique to my Fedora Linux partitions. But since Fedora has its own EFI partition (/dev/disk0s5 in my case), I skipped partition 1 and included partition 5 instead, along with my /, /home and swap partitions. After tweaking the contents of the EFI partition a bit to accommodate both the Mac firmware and the UEFI "firmware" from VirtualBox, it works fine.

[jakehilton]

I got it working like so:

#1. I showed this in my list of drives
$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *500.3 GB disk0
1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_CoreStorage 438.3 GB disk0s2
3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3
4: Microsoft Basic Data BOOTCAMP 61.1 GB disk0s4

#2. I made sure the bootcamp drive was unmounted.. I just used 'Disk Utility' for that.

#3. Make sure permissions are open for the EFI and Bootcamp drives
sudo chmod 777 /dev/disk0s1
sudo chmod 777 /dev/disk0s4

#4. Create vmdk in directory where you want to access it
sudo VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -rawdisk /dev/disk0 -filename win8raw.vmdk -partitions 1,4

#5. Create a new windows 8.1 entry in virtual box and point to the newly created vmdk as the hard drive and start it up.

That is very concise.. but it was based off of the howto by luckyviplav for win7.

Thanks for StC for the suggestion of including the EFI drive when creating the vmdk!

Hope that helps.

[Lime]

Hi,
I have followed some guides and the things mentioned here for how to start my bootcamp partition with Windows 8.1(x64) in virtualbox. I manage to to do all of it but i can not get passed the Windows Splash screen(The blue window and the text Please Wait) when booting. It seems to hang at that step, sometimes the screen is just black.
When i look in the log i see the following lines in the end:

00:00:01.863460 EFI: VBoxDbg> unload '.efi' # 0x0 LB 0x0
00:00:01.882135 EFI: Deleting variable 8be4df61-93ca-11d2-aa0d-00e098032b8c::'BootCurrent'
00:00:01.883875 EFI: Adding variable 8be4df61-93ca-11d2-aa0d-00e098032b8c::'BootCurrent' fAttrib=0x6 cbValue=0x2
00:00:01.939044 EFI: VBoxDbg> loadimage64 'bootmgfw.efi' 0x10000000 LB 0x1f3000

It feels like there is something with the UEFI loading...but i have no idea what to do. Any ideas?

[newbsftw]

I got it working like so:

#1. I showed this in my list of drives
$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *500.3 GB disk0
1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_CoreStorage 438.3 GB disk0s2
3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3
4: Microsoft Basic Data BOOTCAMP 61.1 GB disk0s4

#2. I made sure the bootcamp drive was unmounted.. I just used 'Disk Utility' for that.

#3. Make sure permissions are open for the EFI and Bootcamp drives
sudo chmod 777 /dev/disk0s1
sudo chmod 777 /dev/disk0s4

#4. Create vmdk in directory where you want to access it
sudo VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -rawdisk /dev/disk0 -filename win8raw.vmdk -partitions 1,4

#5. Create a new windows 8.1 entry in virtual box and point to the newly created vmdk as the hard drive and start it up.

That is very concise.. but it was based off of the howto by luckyviplav for win7.

Thanks for StC for the suggestion of including the EFI drive when creating the vmdk!

Hope that helps.

- Your post saved me and I managed to access my Windows 7 bootcamp partition within VirtualBox's raw access.

- I tried today Windows 8.1 because the Retina DPI problem was driving my eyes crazy, and it error'ed with "fatal int 18 boot failure". Solution was very simple: Enable EFI (Special OSes only)

Many thanks !!!

[tetsuo29]

I've been trying the suggestion about including my EFI partition and whenever I run the command

Code: Select all

sudo VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -rawdisk /dev/disk0 -filename win8raw.vmdk -partitions 1,4

I get the following error:

VBoxManage: error: VMDK: could not open raw partition file '/dev/disk0s1'
VBoxManage: error: Error code VERR_ACCESS_DENIED at /Users/vbox/tinderbox/4.3-mac-rel/src/VBox/Storage/VMDK.cpp(3533) in function int vmdkCreateRawImage(VMDKIMAGE*, VBOXHDDRAW*, uint64_t)
VBoxManage: error: Cannot create the raw disk VMDK: VERR_ACCESS_DENIED
VBoxManage: error: The raw disk vmdk file was not created

I'm now running OS X 10.11 El Capitan. It's almost like it considers the EFI partition mounted or busy in some fashion. I've verified that the chmod 777 command on /dev/disk0s1 has worked. Any ideas about how to get my Win 8.1 partition booting inside of Virtual Box on El Capitan would be lovely.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions or insights.