virtualbox.org

I have recently installed Virtualbox to run WindowsXP as a guest under Windows 10. I wanted it to install the guest on startup so I made .bat file containing

"C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe" startvm WinXP

This worked OK but I could see all of the steps on my screen, so I tried to see whether I could run the startup minimised and changed the batchfile to

start /min "C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe" startvm WinXP

When I restarted my machine, I received the message

Windows cannot find 'startvm'. Make sure you've typed the name correctly, then try again.

It does this consistently, so it wasn't just a transient fault.

Can anyone help me to resolve the problem please?

Alan Scott (alan.scott@ccc.ox.ac.uk)

I won't address the "start /min" issue because I haven't see that one, but if you don't want to see what's happening why not just start the VM in headless mode? That's a VM process that doesn't have a "display" window attached to it, equivalent to a PC without a monitor. When you need to interact you RDP into it from the host, so of course you need a network connection (bridged or host-only). You should check if your XP (Pro) guest has the RDP client components installed.