[Solved]W7 physical hardrive to vhd. Can the repair disk along the partitions be used?

[GC-rookie]

I have clone my ssd physical hardrive to a vhd image.

As expected, i have that boot failed message, telling me to eventually use my repair disk.

Great!, On that drive i have all the partition of the original, and stands there also the recovery/repair hidden partition
HDD was cloned a few times through time while hdd life was ending with efficient reinstall/recovery partitions

Is there a way to access and boot on that repair disk and got windows repairs/reset itself to run within that virtual machine ? (i guess not because it got to boot on the master , isn't ?)

This is the first time i try to clone a physical drive into a virtualBox machine and if there is much tweaking to do hopping to get it running , i do not have the skills to have an idea of what i'll be doing.

What i did not try: boot on that physical hardisk inside a virtual machine and clone it to a virtual drive inside that machine . Is that even possible, a better option ?

thanks for reading me .


<edit>
asking about booting/cloning physical HDD from the machine because of:
[quote]The I/O cache encountered an error while updating data
in medium "ahci-0-0" (rc=VERR_ACCESS_DENIED).
Make sure there is enough free space on the disk
and that the disk is working properly.

Operation can be resumed afterwards.[/quote]
from 2 different working W7 SSD clones (both are working cloned from the original disk dead years ago, one was clean restored to the first day and w7 updated , while the other is the configuration i have for years)[/color]

[mpack]

Assuming that the "repair disk" is a CD, then you could image it to ISO and then boot the VM from it. I'm not sure however that the repair CD is a good plan.

You don't give much details of the VM, for example the exact wording of the "boot failed" message would be useful. There is nothing at all inevitable about receiving such a message if you know what you're doing. And simple solutions could be offered if the exact failure was known.

If you just want to access files in the image then it can be accessed as the second drive in a new Windows VM.

[GC-rookie]

Hello , thanks to mind my trouble.

The message i got from the vhd image starting the machines tells me that it could not start because of a missing device and offers me to do :
1 > insert your windows installation disc and restart ypour computer.
2 > choose your language settings and then click next.
3 > click "repair your computer".

The disk/ vhd hold 4 partitions where the recovery one stands. I have also indeed 7 CDS + 2 CD with apps and drivers burned from the beginning which are a copy of the pc and its sofwar installed. but it won't help me to preserve the actual configuration i 'd like to virtualize.

I also tried to boot from the disk itself from a virtual machine, it also breaks, but i can see window loading and the logo appearing, but stops when supposed to start. (i suppose it's facing the same issue .. hardware unexpected)

here is the message from the machine boot from the hardisk (on usb)
The I/O cache encountered an error while updating data
in medium "ahci-0-0" (rc=VERR_ACCESS_DENIED).
Make sure there is enough free space on the disk
and that the disk is working properly.

Operation can be resumed afterwards.
error id : BLKCACHE_IOERR

I'm totally confused here not knowing enough to go further, but i still believe it should be a way somehow to start that w7

[mpack]

The "IO cache" error has nothing to do with the attempt to virtualize a physical PC. At face value it seems to be saying that the media you're running Win7 from is read only. Windows (i.e. the Win7 guest OS) doesn't allow allow a primary hard drive to be read-only.

Concrete steps: don't attempt to run a VM from a read only drive, and avoid FAT formatted drives and USB flash drives. The VM should be copied into local internal storage, or located on an external USB 3.1 SSD.

It sounds like you have made some unfortunate missteps by breaking the image onto multiple DVD-Rs. I'm not even sure how you did that - was this a separate archiving tool? Not a split VHD? A far better choice would be to create the image as a single VHD file on an external USB drive (formatted in NTFS) or network drive. Note that this would be only for transport: it is still best copied to a local drive.

My own PC has a 2TB internal drive 2 precisely to give me plenty of space to store "test and play" VMs locally. My very most important working VMs are run from my system SSD.

[GC-rookie]

ho, i realize that being confused i am not clear and talk about too many things at once.

My CDs recovery where burnt from the software going along with the computer. they are meant to be used to recover the computer as it was on delivery day . I think these useless actually for the matter and from the hdd recovery was much faster.

The SSD hardisk has 4 partitions, one with the running OS and the 3 others are for a recovery part of 14.00gb ( the one burnt on those CDs) , 3.5gb where seems to stand the windows install/repair disk , and 100Mo

The SSD i try to virtualize boots fine from usb on my old laptop.

From my new computer (w10) , on usb , via the explorer the drives(2 only) i can access are read-only (windows 10 security features ? ) I did not realized untill now

Running virtualBox as an administrator allows me to boot from the usb where stands that drive (and its 4 partitions).

But , yes , that SSD connected via USB remains read-only ... which i did not decide .

I have to find out how i can decide it is not read-only and see if that helps go further.

thanks for pointing this out to me .

[GC-rookie]

After a few other tries, i'm back to square one

removing the read-only attribute from the hard drive is not a good idea.
After that, trying to run it via virtualbox , i add that time no loading nor logo, it crashed right away.
Connecting back the HDD to its original machine showed that the system was damage and could not start anymore. (that kind of things happens all the time )
it tried to repair itself but needed to use the last restore point to efficiently recover.

So i'm again with a vhd not working because of a missing device and the physical drive connected via USB that is still read-only and won't start windows freezing when the logo shows up.

Has anyone any suggestion of how i could manage to virtualize that disk.

The computer it belongs to is about to die ( I7 acer 8943g, 10 years old )

SSD is samsung 840 pr0 240go.
vhd made from diskgenius, (disk2vhd failed) and i did not figure out to make an image of this HDD from clonevdi. The vhd file stands almost alone on a 1TO hardrive connected to the mother board (no CD/USB drive).
virtualbox is 6.1 running on W10. with VM virtualBox Extension Pack 6.1.2r135662


________________________________________________________________________
Problem solved: No need to use the repair disk, use a disk that works fine first .

The original SSD had was corrupt and could not be entirely copied properly , once cloned to a new HDD (via clonezilla), vdi or vhd image created from that new disk worked fine.

However, it is yet not possible to use that drive to boot from it via USB from a virtual machine

[scottgus1]

that SSD connected via USB remains read-only

Once when I tried to run a VM with the disk file stored on a USB drive I had to run Virtualbox as Administrator to get the VM to boot. It's dangerous: you need a malware-free host, but it can be tried.

[mpack]

@GC-rookie.

I see that you solved your problem - congratulations.

Future tip: please in future do not edit your first post to give the solution, as that totally messes up the flow of the discussion. A conclusion should come at the end of a discussion, not at the beginning - so simply add a final post to the topic.

Happily your version of this was not the worst. We've seen people discard the text of their post #1 entirely, replacing it with their solution, making the discussion impossible to understand and useless for every future visitor to these forums.

[GC-rookie]

@GC-rookie.

I see that you solved your problem - congratulations.

Future tip: please in future do not edit your first post to give the solution, as that totally messes up the flow of the discussion. A conclusion should come at the end of a discussion, not at the beginning - so simply add a final post to the topic.

Happily your version of this was not the worst. We've seen people discard the text of their post #1 entirely, replacing it with their solution, making the discussion impossible to understand and useless for every future visitor to these forums.

Noted and thanks again for all the tips , i haven't use virtualbox or played with diskparts(and alike tools) for a few years and looks like i forgot some basics , also thanks @ scottgus1 ... i unfortunately did try to run virtualBox as Administrator with the corrupt image, which did not work either