How does rawdisk mbr loading work? Weird MBR Setup

[michorn]

I am attempting to use virtualbox to load my Ubuntu 9.04 partition as a VM in Win7x64RC1. I was able to successfully create the disk but when I run the VM the Vbox bios reports 'missing operating system'. I am assuming that this is due to a lack of a bootloader in the VM. The caviat with my system that makes me think this is that I have an unusual mbr setup on the physical disk where the Vista/7BCD bootloader has the mbr and that calls Grub (the linux bootloader) which is installed on the linux partition that I am rawdisking.

So I am looking for:
1) How when a rawdisk vmdk is created does the virtual machine deal with the MBR?
2) Is there a way to get it to work with Win7 host and my strange MBR configuration?
-#1 I need to know #2 would be nice I could figure it out using 1 but if someone knows no need to reinvent.
3) Am I going to run into a similar problem using the same Ubuntu as host and rawdisking 7?

Manual 9.10.2 talks about loading an mbr but it calls a windows file from XP and as I understand it in Vista the MBR functions changed from .ini files to registry edits. In short the manual has enough for working Win in Linux but not for Linux in Win.

Cheers!

[Sasquatch]

What you need to do is check the manual again. There is also a sticky in Windows Guests (yes, I know, you're on a Linux Guest) for how to create an MBR file. That file is used as a replacement of your native MBR on the physical disk. After you've attached the MBR file, boot the VM with a live CD and recover the system so you can install Grub again in the MBR. There are plenty of howto's on the web for that. Involves something like this:
find /boot/grub/stage1
root (hd0,0)
setup (hd0)
Or something like that.