Migrating VMWare Fusion XP Guest to VirtualBox 3 - SOLVED

[philcolbourn]

I'm stuck.

I have a VMware Fusion XP guest that I want to migrate to VirtualBox 3.

I used qemu-img tool to convert to it to a raw image and then I used a tool inside VirtualBox.App to convert the raw image to a VDI and all went well.
The VM boots in VirtualBox (once I turned-on IO-APIC).

XP guest wants to install a VMWare pointing device - is this correct? Where do I get the driver from?
It also can't install VMware Accelerated AMD PCNet Adaptor, Base System and Video controller.

Is there an ISO with all these drivers on it that I haven't noticed? Is there a button to click to mount a magic drive?

Where am i going wrong?

I also can't seem to get a shared directory working either.

[philcolbourn]

Why is it that when you admit that you've failed and post a question only to discover the solution in the next minute?

There is an VBoxGuestAdditions.ISO in the VirtualBox.App file.

But even easier ( ) is that you can select it from the CD/DVD mount ISO page!

Sorry for wasting your time.

[philcolbourn]

A few gotchas...

1. You need to remove VMWare's Tools. This seems to prevent VirtualBox's network driver from working.
2. I had to shutdown the VM twice as it got stuck.
3. I had to re-activate XP which, thankfully, went well.

Remember if at first you don't succeed, try, try, try, try... You have only failed when you have given up.

[Paul from Barking]

I've specifically created myself an account just to add a post to this thread.

I have been using VMWare with an XP guest on a Windows 8 -> 8.1 -> 10 host basically since XP stopped getting patched 3 years ago.... I use a dBase / Clipper 5 old-as-the-hills CRM system I've had 20 odd years (correction 25+ years)... I just need to be able to run and cut & paste from the "DOS window" (which I know is more correctly called the 'command line interface) - because as we all know true DOS programs are no longer supported beyond XP.

I have had megga problems over the last 4 weeks with VMWare (the guest crashing for all sorts of capricious events) so having read-up how to continue, I "OVF'd" the virtual machine and loaded it ..... perfect.....

But I have spent all day watching YouTube videos, checking again and again and again and again why the ****** thing wouldn't / couldn't "see" my datatank (where the data tables are stored).

Anyway - this thread has saved my sanity and I just wanted to say thank you to the posters for the pointer to just unload VMWare's tools. Having crib-tried every single possible combination for the built in network settings / options with virtual box (nothing of which would work), on googling "VMWare Driver for Virtualbox", this thread came up. I just removed the VMW tools - and bingo, 1st restart after removing.

So to say thank you and to bump this up where others might see it should they need it too - thank you one again.

Paul from Barking

[BillG]

I am pleased to see that! It cannot be said too often.

This really applies to migrating any vm from one virtualization system to another. The additions (whatever they are called for the particular system) add extra bits of code to the guest OS to make it run better in a virtual machine under that system. If they are not removed before you migrate they can cause problems under the new system, and may be hard to remove at that stage.

The best solution is to uninstall them before you start the migration.