virtualbox.org

First, a bit of background: My father and I have been using Windows XP on Parallels version 3.0 (both with separate licenses of XP and Parallels). Now that Snow Leopard is out, Apple has posted that Parallels 3.0 is no longer compatible. With no compelling reason to pay for an upgrade to Parallels 4.0, I am attempting to migrate both of our VMs to VirtualBox instead.

I've uninstalled Parallels tools and prepared the VMs by uninstalling Parallels-specific hardware, then run the VMWare Converter utility to convert the hardrive to the VMDK format as outlined at Neil Turner's blog. With ACPI I/O enabled, and the VirtualBox tools installed, I can get the machines to work more consistantly IF no network adaptor is present.

If I enable a network adapter that Windows has not seen before, it will boot once and detect the hardware after boot. I will be able to use the network properly for the remainder of that session. As soon as I reboot, Windows will hang with a black screen (after displaying the Windows XP boot screen for a couple moments) and refuse to boot into the OS. Safe mode works, and even Safe mode with networking! If I boot with logging enabled, the last loaded entry in ntbtlog.txt is Mup.sys, but Googling on that didn't find anything working solutions.

The issue is somewhat similar to the Windows 2000 issue posted by zenguerrilla, but since it's a different version of the OS, and slightly different symptoms, I'm posting it here. That thread also never seemed to come up with a solution

I eventually gave up on my VM and reinstalled Windows, which worked fine (since I have my Windows CD handy). Unfortunately, my Dad's CD is in storage behind piles of other stuff, and we can't get at it, so re-installation isn't an option (unless there's a way to more cleanly mirror from the present install). Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

A reinstall is always possible, you don't need the exact same media you used to install the previous install with. If your and your fathers version of XP is the same, then all you need is your install disc and you're done. The key can be extracted with tools like KeyFinder, and then used during installation.

Before reinstalling right away, which NIC did you use for the VM? I'm guessing the default AMD PCNet III adapter. What if you use the Intel/PRO1000T Server (XP has the driver for it build in)? Do you get the same after a reboot?

Something to try, create a second VM disk (VDI) and clone the vmdk to this VDI, swap disk around, detach vmdk, set only IDE as VM disk setting. (a vbox cli convert could also work).

Unfortunately, the two versions of XP are not the same; mine is a full install of XP Professional with SP2 included; my father's is an upgrade edition of XP Home with no service packs. I guess "locating" an image and re-using his key is possible if all else fails .

I had tried it with both the PC Net II and PC Net III drivers, each of which allowed one boot. I just tried it with the Intel PRO/1000 T and had the same effect (first boot okay, second black screen). When I was first troubleshooting my image, I tried the PRO/1000 MT with downloaded drivers; that actually froze during the driver install.

I may try cloning the disk into into a VDI image, but I don't expect using one disk image format instead of another would impact Windows too much.