virtualbox.org

I'm getting a new PC pretty soon (due in about a week), and I got the wild idea that, instead of going through the tedious process of reinstalling all my apps, I would just image the primary hard disk of my old PC (running XP Pro), transfer that to my new PC, and fix whatever damage occurs. The main problem I foresaw is that my old PC has an IDE drive, the new PC will have a SATA drive (I didn't realise it was significant, but my old PC also had AGP graphics).

Then I got another bright idea, I could find out what the issues were in advance, using Virtualbox: by creating an IDE VM to begin with I could deal with any other problems first, leaving myself with just the IDE->SATA problem to worry about. So, I used Acronis True Image to image my old PC, I created a new VM whose specs were as close as possible to my old PC, and "restored" the image onto the virtual hard disk. At first I got nowhere, but there's a web page on this site describing common migration pitfalls (*). Basically I had to get into "recovery console", enter the commands "disable agp440" and then "disable processor" (the last one sounds insane, but apparantly has no downside), and then reboot. Amazing! I now had a working clone of my old PC, as a VM. Of course the graphics had reverted to low res, but I installed VBox guest additions which took care of that: all working sweet as a nut. I expected a lot more trouble than this from a P2V project! Even the apps I expected to give problems (protected by flexLM license manager) couldn't tell that anything had changed, and so continued to run normally.

Ok, now the IDE to SATA bit. I'm running XP Pro SP2 which AFAIK does not support SATA drives out of the box. Certainly if I simply change the VM setting to SATA then the XP VM will not boot (stop 0x0000007B). I downloaded what I'm told are the correct Intel drivers, but installing them with the F6 boot option or inside Windows still left me with the same stop message.

So, can anyone give me any tips on doing the IDE -> SATA bit with an XP VM? It occurs to me that if I do get it working well as a VM then I can image it again with Acronis, and restore that into my new PC when it arrives.

(*) See here.
http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Migrate_Windows

There is a topic here that describes how to get the VM migrated from IDE to SATA. It comes down to enabling the SATA controller, install the driver, then attach the hdd to the SATA controller. Windows has the driver installed now, so it should go without issues.

For your idea however, is an entirely different story. Your install doesn't have the device drivers for your new PC, nor can you install the SATA controller beforehand, because it won't install if it isn't detected. You will also face a lot of other problems, like CPU change. The end result could be messy at best, and not work for worst. In between you have the possibility of very poor performance compared to a clean install.

Thanks for the quick response.

Sasquatch wrote:Your install doesn't have the device drivers for your new PC, nor can you install the SATA controller beforehand, because it won't install if it isn't detected. You will also face a lot of other problems, like CPU change. The end result could be messy at best...

Didn't I already do all of that? I migrated from physical to virtual, including having all the wrong device drivers for the VM, plus the VM having a radically different CPU (P4 -> Core 2 Duo). All of that went surprisingly smoothly, XP coped with it well - I wasn't even asked for the install CD. It's only the IDE to SATA conversion step that I don't have working.

Do you have a link to the IDE/SATA migration discussion you mentioned? In most of the discussions I remember (that I took part in), the advice was "don't do it!". But in this case I need to do it...

As to the result maybe not running smoothly as a new install, I just knew someone would bring that up. I'm not some noob who lets debris collect on their PCs hard disk. It's my software development PC, and I keep it pretty lean. I've been using it about four years and it runs as fast now as it did at the start. I'm only upgrading it because the hardware itself is too limited for things I want to do today, like run Virtualbox!

Reinstalling apps would be a nightmare that I'm trying to avoid. A lot of my dev tools have been updated and patched several times since the original install from a CD.

mpack wrote:It occurs to me that if I do get it working well as a VM then I can image it again with Acronis, and restore that into my new PC when it arrives.

might work somehow, but why do it complicated by going into virtual in between?

a single bootable IDE i/face in the new PC should do:
backup disk(s)
still on old system: deinstall e.g. graphics, AGP, chipset drivers
attach IDE disk to new PC and boot from, install SATA drivers now that Windows sees the hardware
boot linux live-CD and use gparted and/or fdisk, dd, ntfsresize ... to copy the contents of IDE to SATA drive edit: probably the copy could be done w/ your acronis tool, too
boot windows from SATA drive and install remaining drivers.

done that with my sons PC: from AMD s939 board with AGP to intel s775 board with PCIe, singlecore to quad.

fixedwheel wrote:might work somehow, but why do it complicated by going into virtual in between?

My original point in going virtual was to find out what the difficulties were in moving a system image from one PC, to another with radically different hardware. I've never done it before, so I wanted to see if it was practical. The idea that I could then re-image the virtual PC was an afterthought: your suggestion makes a lot of sense though.

Still, I haven't had a real answer to my original question: has anyone had any success in converting a working IDE VM to a working SATA VM? If so, what were the precise steps?

I have done it without any big problems.
Approximate steps (been a while).
Download drivers from intel and install in the guest.
Shutdown guest.
Add an extra virtual disk (small just temporary may be from another machine that's not running). Set this disk as sata and enable sata.
Start guest it should now find sata controller.
Shutdown guest
Remove extra disk. Switch ide disk to sata0
Start guest and hold your thumbs hopefully it works now.

baf wrote:Approximate steps (been a while).

Ouch! This turns out to be trivially simple to do. Thanks for the tip though, it was along the right lines.

1. First you need a floppy disk image containing the SATA drivers from Intel. I found a readymade floppy image here: http://www.4shared.com/file/114857273/9 ... ivers.html.
You need to mount this floppy image in your VM (but don't start the VM yet).

2. Enable the SATA controller in the VBox settings for your VM (that's all: no need to create a new VDI).

3. Start the VM. XP will say "New hardware found" and offer to search for drivers. Choose the option to search local removeable media. If you mounted the floppy image as detailed above then Windows finds the correct driver and installs it.

4. Shut down the VM, change the drive controller from "IDE Primary Master" to "SATA Port 0". Start up again, everything works, hooray!

The difficulty I was having before is that the floppy contains four drivers and if you try the f6 route then it isn't clear which is the correct one. Letting Windows choose the correct driver for itself is much simpler.

Strangely, the only application so far that has detected any change is Office 2003. When I fired up either Word or Excel it said something like "installing Office feature" (no idea what), and prompted for the install CD. I did so and then it was ok.

ps. I hate the fact that I have to link to an offsite file from this message. You know that link is going to break sometime. It would be so nice if this site had its own files area.

For the record both ways are possible to use. I prefer the extra vdi because for me it feels like I have better control.

Looking back over this thread I see that Sasquatch in fact gave a complete answer to my question, but it was so short and simple that I thought it was only a summary! Sorry Sasquatch.

Thanks for the tips, guys. These steps worked well for me.

1. Shut down the guest OS (in my case, Windows 2003 Std Server with SP2).
2. Add SATA controller to the guest's configuration.
3. Boot into the guest OS, install the latest Intel Matrix Storage Manager driver (f6flpy3288.zip).
4. Shut down the guest OS, change the guest's 'Hard Disk' configuration from IDE to SATA.
5. Boot the guest OS up, voila! it's running on SATA now.

mpack wrote:Looking back over this thread I see that Sasquatch in fact gave a complete answer to my question, but it was so short and simple that I thought it was only a summary! Sorry Sasquatch.

Yeah, I tend to say a lot with a few words, but I can also do it the other way around, use a lot of words for something small.

To tell you the truth, I didn't notice it was you at first. I thought it was just another user asking something. Should check the user names more often .

Although everything seems to working, I just noticed something odd about my newly SATA enabled VMs (which run XP Pro btw).

On the guests taskbar is a little icon to "Safely remove hardware..." which I normally associate with USB flash drives and other USB devices. However I have no USB devices attached to the VM, in fact USB support is not even enabled. If I click on the little icon then a menu pops up containing one option which is "Safely remove VBOX HARDDISK - Drive (C:)".

Does that mean that XP thinks drive C (my system partition) is a removeable drive? Surely that can't be right!

Well sata is in principle hot swapable so it might be because of that. But you won't be able to detach it due to open files.

It would be fun to just try it and see what happens, make a backup first though!

Just tested it on a non system vdi and the result was a quick bsod. And check this thread from another forum. Last post in that thread:

Just recieved confirmation from Intel. Intel does NOT support hot-swap in any software release for any MB chipset released to the public.
Hot-swap is supported in various *NIX and Windows corporate server OSes, but not for the home user, with OSes such as WinXP.
I will have to get a hot-swap capable PCIe card or change over to a nVidia 680i based board.