WinXP booting from a physical disk?

[seank123]

Have VirtualBox installed on a Windows Server 2003 machine and am trying to get XP Pro to boot from an existing installation on another hard drive in the machine. Both OSs are installed on SATA drives.

I have created a .vmdx file with VBoxManage.exe but when I try to load this I get as far as selecting Safe Mode/Normal Boot etc then nothing... if I select Safe Mode it gets as far as loading 'pagp.exe' then stalls and does nothing - Norma Boot gives the grey bar at the bottom then stalls - no Windows logo.

Any ideas where I am going wrong?

Cheers

[TerryE]

There are lots of posts discussing this general issue of windows migration and dual boot. The core issue here is not a VirtualBox one. It's that as far as windows is concerned the VM and the underlying native hardware are quite different: different disk controllers, NICs, Graphics Adapters, ... and a Windows HDD is crotchety if you move it from one machine to another. There are workarounds as is discussed in the sticky topic in the windows Guests forum.