virtualbox.org

I am running Virtualbox 3.0.8 on Mac OS X 10.5. I have a working virtual machine running Windows XP Home. Today I bought a downloadable copy of Windows 7 Home Premium (32 bit) from the Microsoft web site. I downloaded Windows 7 to a virtual disk attached to my Win XP virtual machine. I then added an new empty disk to this machine and installed Windows 7 on it. Now when I start the XP machine the Windows boot loader asks me which version of Windows I want to run and they both work fine. But that's not the way I want to run them. I want the two versions of Windows to be separate virtual machines. But when I create a new virtual machine with the Windows 7 disk as it's only HDD it won't boot. I get a FATAL: INT18: BOOT FAILURE error.

Can anyone tell me how to make the disk bootable or how to perform the install correctly. Thanks.

Rick

Perhaps you need to create an ISO from the download then copy the ISO out of the XP VM (to Mac shared folder), then mount that ISO to a new Windows 7 VM and install from there:

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2009/10/2 ... box-files/
http://forums.overclockersclub.com/?showtopic=169044
http://www.google.co.nz/search?q=window ... ital+river

That's not the problem. The primary hard drive has the boot loader, the second doesn't. Boot the W7 VM with the install ISO and run a repair on it. That should fix the MBR and boot loader. You should do the same for XP, so you will loose the W7 boot loader and question for dual boot.

Mark,

Thank you very much. It worked like a charm.

Rick

Sasquatch,

You're right about the boot loader but the first problem was that the downloadable version of Win 7 (or at least the one I got) is not an ISO. I needed to turn it into one before I could boot the Win 7 VM with it.

Rick

Where did you download Win 7 from? All OS downloads from Microsoft are in iso format these days.

I bought through the Windows 7 student promotion at http://www.win741.com/ and it was fulfilled by Digital River. It is delivered in 3 files as described at http://www.mydigitallife.info/2009/10/2 ... box-files/

There were several problems with the downloadable student version of Win 7.