virtualbox.org

Hello all,
I have been a very happy user of VBox. I now need to move a VBox installation to a real computer (laptop in this case - Acer Aspire 6930G - HAL: AHCI Multiprocessor). I've used imaging/cloning to move this installation several times with many configs with no success.
When I usually move a XP install, I usually image the partitions with Image for Windows/Linux and then restore to new drive then repair install with XP CD. I must have done this 100 times with no issues. This, however is obviously different. After imaging, all I get is the Windows preload screen with blue progress bar. There is no drive activity. I've read online that the HAL is usually the culprit. HAL in the guest is AHCI Uniprocessor - guest a little slower (as manual and VBox warned) but working perfectly. Reimaged and restored, same result. With most of the tries (up to over 34 at this writing - and that doesn't count the maybe 40 tries before I started counting) I've tried to go to Safe Mode - and the new computer gets to the background screen and a message pops up: "Windows XP cannot start in Safe Mode. Setup will now reboot." I've looked that up and it suggests disconnecting hardware. As this is a laptop, I cannot really do that. In any case, when I do a clean install, everything is fine, so I know the hardware works with XP. I've tried to do a "dd" in linux to copy the image to the new partition, I've installed clean and tried to do a Windows Backup & Restore and all results are the same. Apparently it doesn't matter if I uninstall VBox guest additions before imaging/backing up or not - all results are the same. Stuck on Windows XP pre-load page. I've replaced the registry files with the ones in the repair folder - still no change (I've copied the old ones as backup - read a post for fixing mup.sys isues). With default registry files, I would assume that would eliminate the incompatible leftover drivers question. I've chkdsk /p /r MANY times - no change. I really need to move this install to a laptop - it MUST be preserved and the customer wants to have this install on her laptop - intact - nothing less will work for her - and I've been messing around with this for over a week - so I'm losing $$ to boot (have worked on nothing else). Is there anything that a senior VBox guru can tell me that I haven't already considered that could help me get this project done?

Sorry, I don't have a real idea and it seems that you have much more experience in Windows installation than me. However, keep in mind that Windows is very pity if the storage controller of the boot partition changes. In that case it usually shows a BSOD. If I understood you correctly then you do an installation within VBox and then move that WinXP installation to real hardware. So an idea could be to change the storage controller which is VBox emulating before the WinXP installation starts. The default is PIIX4 but you might want to try ICH6 as well.

Thanks Frank - I am just trying to learn as much as I can in the worlds of virtualization and Linux. Usually I go p2v, but a customer asked that I migrate v2p and all of my attempts so far have failed. The storage card issue is one that I've thought of several times - but I thought that doing a Windows repair (with a slipstreamed disk with the new ICH9 drivers (new computer) on it) would have replaced the old machine's drivers. I thought about uninstalling the driver for the drive controller in the XP guest environment before imaging, but since I'd stripped the XP install (VBox guest) of pretty much everything except the drive controller, I didn't want to impact the imaging process (in case VBox needed the existing driver to access the VDI file). Can you confirm that I can remove the existing drive controller and still read from the drive I am trying to image?

Frank,
After re-reading your post and several other awesome posts here in the forum, I've successfully converted my XP guest from IDE to SATA drives. I am imagin now and hopefully that will get the job done. I'll post my results for the forum. Thanks for all of your help.

Update: although I have successfully converted the XP SP3 VM to ACPI & SATA, I have still not been able to transfer the XP SP3 partition to another computer (V2P) and have it load. I have uninstalled the VM guest additions before imaging and after the restore to the new computer (laptop - Acer Aspire 6930G) XP SP3 will not load. I've done an XP repair many times even ensuring that the correct HAL is selected (ACPI Multiprocessor PC although the selected HAL when I press F5 is always "Other") and even tried to force "ACPI Uniprocessor PC" (HAL on XP SP3 VM). If I try to go to "Safe Mode" a message box with the "Windows XP cannot start in Safe Mode. Setup will now restart" error. The Ntbtlog.txt file is kind of useless as all it shows is drivers it tried to load - but nothing regarding why XP SP3 will not load. If anyone has any suggestions, please pass them along. I've been working on this for two weeks and I'd promised the client that it should only take a couple of days (I never expected V2P to be this difficult - I've done P2V ***several*** times with no issues at all). Thanks in advance.

Success! I removed one of the RAM modules and it booted right up. Installed drivers, re-installed RAM, and I'm good to go!