I've trawled with google and searched the forums; having limited success with this; so I am hoping someone might see this and have an idea.
- I have an emachines latop (d620) which is running Ubuntu 10.04; and I've got Virtualbox "PUEL Edition" 3.2.8 (latest) installed
- I have not problems with many guest OS's in Virtual Box (WinXP, Other Linux flavours for testing, etc)
- I have a VistaBasic license (OEM) which was bundled with my laptop, and I thought "for fun" I would try to install a VirtualBox VistaBasic instance as follows:
(a) create VirtualBox VM from scratch, indicating "Vista 32bit" as guest OS; carve out HDD space and then boot my DVD installer media disc 1-of-2
(b) note that my 'install media' is actually a 'recovery disc set' created by Emachines the first time I booted my laptop. So it isn't a 'traditional' Microsoft OS installer. However, this thing does boot, verifies I want to 'restore' my EMachines Vista; then locates the HDD; partitions it (single large NTFS) and restores vista install files onto the HDD. After first reboot of the VistaVM, it does various "setting up your system" steps that proceed for ~20+ minutes.
(c) once this is finished, I can login to my VistaBasic guest just fine. The thing appears to work properly; no complaints about license or anything else. I can proceed to uninstall all the 'fluff' apps bundled (Norton 360, various silly online games, bundled video ATI driver; bundled Marvell NIC driver; etc). But some issues become apparent after a few minutes:
--> even after I install the VirtualBox Guest Additions, display adaptor only has limited modes (not appropriate perfectly for my wide-screen aspect ratio laptop LCD); the network adaptor does not work (even though e1000 is being presented by VirtualBox as the 'better pick' for Vista). Additionally sound does not work.
---> Looking in device manager, I note that there are exclamation-point triangles next to those devices (network, display, sound); and digging into the driver details they all reveal the same basic error message: "This device cannot find enough free resources that it can use (code 12) If you want to use this device, you will need to disable one of the other devices on this system"
So. Windows isn't having trouble regarding driver availability; it is correctly identifying the devices (VirtualBox display adaptor; Intel e1000 MT Desktop adaptor; Intel AC'97 audio controller) -- rather; it is complaining about .. some odd resource allocation conflict .. ?
If anyone has some idea about this .. certainly it would be greatly appreciated.
Clearly - I realize that this install method is not 'the traditional/or likely best' way; but it is the only vista install media I've got (I certainly wouldn't go out and buy vista!
Thanks,
Tim