virtualbox.org

I am dual booting with GRUB using Vista and Debian testing. I installed VirtualBox 1.3.3, made an expanding 4G drive and installed Windows 98 on it. Then I cloned the vdi, booted the clone and through the booted 98 user interface installed windows 2000 workstation upgrade (it said it was going to format the drive to ntfs). When it said to restart, the screen of the guest hung with a blinking cursor. I shutdown the computer and later powered it up and selected my vista installation from grub only to find that the vista installation was overwritten by 2000. It started to run through chkdsk when I halted it. Can anyone tell me what I did wrong and how to rescue the vista installation or some of its files? I am surprised that VirtualBox gave 2000 direct access to my drive!

Regards
Eric

#fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x3d773d77

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 1269 10193211 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 * 1270 12681 91661318 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 12682 19174 52155022+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 19175 19457 2273197+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 19175 19457 2273166 82 Linux swap / Solaris

#testdisk

TestDisk 6.10, Data Recovery Utility, July 2008
Christophe GRENIER <grenier@cgsecurity.org>
http://www.cgsecurity.org

Disk /dev/sda - 160 GB / 149 GiB - CHS 19458 255 63
Analyse cylinder 7932/19457: 40%


Warning: Incorrect number of heads/cylinder 240 (NTFS) != 255 (HD)
HPFS - NTFS 0 1 1 1268 254 62 20386421 [Recovery]
HPFS - NTFS 1269 0 1 12680 77 59 183322625

This usually happens when you put a CD in the drive and windows is set to auto start the CD.
I see a lot of people that think the one they are clicking on is the VBox install when in reality it is the windows install.

Did you install from a CD?

Yes, installed from CD but within the Guest 98 not the Host Debian. Debian does not support cd autorun.

havealoha wrote:Yes, installed from CD but within the Guest 98 not the Host Debian. Debian does not support cd autorun.

I can't say I know what happened exactly but I do know that if you start the install from VBox it puts everything in a virtual drive. It really does not write or take over the drive itself. I can not think of how it could possibably have written over you other partition unless you made a mistake somewhere. Sorry, maybe some of the really smart people can figure this out.

Are you 100% sure that Vista didn't boot? Do you have the VDI files stored on a shared drive, formatted as NTFS? If that is the case, then Vista detected an error on the file system and started the checkdisk utility to repair them.

My bad! Something changed with mount and ntfs/fuse the same day I made the Win2k Guest so when I rebooted and saw the ntfs chkdsk I about crapped my pants. Before doing anything rash like reinstalling Vista I tried to figure out what happened with the Guest. I did some cloning and fixboot fixmbr'ing and got it to boot. Then I let Vista do its chkdsk. The vdi's are on the ext3 partition. I apologize for the premature outburst.

Aloha