virtualbox.org

I already found another thread which deals with the same problem, although the other person is using linux as a host. You can find his description of the problem here: http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=14091

Here is my problem:

I did a fresh install of Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition into a VirtualBox VM, installed the VirtualBox Additions, added the AD+DNS+DHCP+WDS roles to the Server, and booted a second VirtualBox VM to test network booting. At first I had forgotten to add a boot.wim file, so I got an error after pressing F12 to start the network boot, and after I added the Windows Server 2008 boot.wim file, the netbooting client stops with a black screen now.

I'm using internal networking because I don't want to disrupt the normal network when playing around with the DHCP and WDS stuff. There should be no big difference between the pre-OS used by the Windows Vista installer and the pre-OS used by the WDS/PXE stuff, as this is one of the features of the new editions of the Microsoft products.

I already tried changing the size of the RAM of the client to something bigger, but I still get a black screen when doing a network boot after pressing F12 to start the pre-OS. Getting a DHCP lease and contacting the WDS works at the beginning works fine.

EDIT: I'm using Windows XP SP3 (x86) German

EDIT2: I accidentally let the Client-VM run a little longer, and after a while the normal loading-bar was shown. An hour later it had moved about a cm to the right, and a few hours after that it had finished 4 cms of the 40cm-loading-bar. I won't stop the VM and post about the results tomorrow. Maybe it will work. although it's unusably slow

EDIT3: The VMs are still running. The loading-bar shows that it's loaded about 50%. I also found out that I'm using 2.1.2, although 2.1.4 has been released. I will install the newest version when loading has finished and test again.
Here is a picture of the client trying to netboot (black background + "Windows is loading files..." + loading-bar):

EDIT4: After more than 40 hours of waiting, the VM-client finally showed me the installation-screen. I had a little problem with memory allocation before that (something about me not having enough ram), so I stopped another VM I had running and let the VM continue. The installation seemed to be faster, although I have yet to add an image file to the WDS, so I could not test the actual installation stuff. I will try to play around with some settings, and I will also try to add a floppy drive, because there have been people reporting slow vista installs when they messed something up with the floppy controller on their mainboard.

As I was unable to fix this problem I disabled the internal networking setting, detached my workstation from the corporate network, and started a virtual machine in VirtualPC2007 from Microsoft. Using this configuration (VirtualBox VM with Windows Server 2008 with host interface networking + VirtualPC2007 VM with host interface networking) I can play around with WDS and DHCP settings, although I have to pay special attention to not attach my miniswitch to the network while the VirtualBox VM is running. Next time I will probably just use VirtualPC2007 for both VMs (so I can use internal networking), but this time it would have been too much of a hassle to port the VirtualBox VM to VirtualPC2007.

I really like VirtualBox, and I will continue to use it for my Debian VM, but I can't wait >45 hours to test WDS client configurations

I think I found a workaround: I used host interface networking for both the Windows Server 2008 VM and the netbooting client, and it usually boots in a usable speed if I keep the Windows Server 2008 VM screen visibly in the background and the client as the active window.

The reason why it worked better with VirtualPC at first was that I just did exactly this without thinking about it, whereas I was browsing on the net looking for problem solutions (I had alot of trouble with WDS at first ) when I used the internal networking of Virtual Box. If I minimized both windows when using VirtualPC (Client) and VirtualBox (Server 2008), the VirtualBox client took about 45 minutes to boot (which is still kinda usable), but now that I know this workaround I will stick with VirtualBox.

I have a similar issue. Linux host. Windows Server 2008 R2 guest with WDS on, and an external router that points netboot requests to the WDS server. I'm trying to PXE-boot a guest and use WDS to deploy an image from the Server guest to the client guest. Because the DHCP server is on the LAN, I must use bridging.

It looks like using the e1000 series of emulated hardware was spiking the CPU and taking -forever- to boot from the BIOS. I'm talking 24+ hours.

Switching to the AMD PC-NET series lets netboot/PXE work well, but Windows 7 doesn't have drivers, so as soon as the boot image is loaded, you're stuck with no way to access the WDS server for the install.wim.

My fix was to set up -two- virtual NICs on the guest, the first is an AMD PC-NET kind, which allows PXE booting, the second was an e1000, which has support from inside the boot image. It seems to work, just remove the AMD NIC after installation.

This worked for me too:

When you create the Virtual Machine, add 2 networkcards, with the following configuration:

Network card 1:
Attached to: Internal Network
Name: intnet (default)
adapter type: PCnet-FAST III

Network card 2:
attached to: Internal Network
name: intnet (default)
adapter type: Intel PRO /1000 MT Desktop

During the boot process the virtual machine will use the PCnet-FAST network card, however during the actual installation it will use the Intel card.