virtualbox.org

Hi All,

I have an Acer laptop and a set of eRecovery Discs for Windows Vista Business. I currently run Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on this laptop and would like to run Vista in VirtualBox, as I need it for a specific piece of software.

However, when I boot the Recovery Discs, I get to a screen that states:

"Restore from factory default

1. This action will erase all existing data on C:"

Please can someone confirm that since I am booting this INSIDE VirtualBox then this will only affect the VirtualBox drive, not the Laptop Drive?

As you can tell I'm a noob when it comes to VirtualBox

Thanks in advance

Shando

I have good news and bad news.

The good news: yes, the software on that CD can only affect the virtual drive C inside the Virtual PC which the software thinks it is running on. Your host hard drive cannot be harmed.

The bad news: you can't install Vista from a recovery CD. By all means try it though, since as mentioned above you can't do any harm. I seldom truck with recovery CDs, but my understanding is that they generally work by restoring factory default data from a hidden partition on your host drive. Obviously that partition is not available if you try to install on other PCs (including virtual ones). If you P2V your laptop drive the data would be available, but I suspect that a mfr specific recovery CD will also do hardware signature checks which the VM will fail, the virtual hardware being different from the hardware of your Acer laptop.

Hi mpack,

Thanks for the response.

I'll give it a go anyway and see what happens.

Regards

Shando

Some Discs work, many not.

After installing you must activate Windows because of the different hardware from guest and host.

And this does not work the legal way.