Trying to test save state in SBS 2003 (http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=37970). I have a backup of my server vdi's on an external USB hard drive. I attached the vdi's on the USB HD to my home PC, where I had successfully attached them before on my PC's internal drives during server construction, to test the concept of safety on the server when saving state. I had the following error when I tried to boot up:
- IMAGE_READ_ONLY
- imagereadonly.jpg (53.04 KiB) Viewed 2094 times
The drive and its contents were not marked read only in Windows. I then tried copying the vdi to my PC's internal HD, and it booted up.
I then tried copying a small text file to the USB drive and Windows popped up a UAC need-administrator-permissions window to do the copy. So Windows may get in the way of the boot process. I then tried pointing the VM back to the USB drive vdi's and restarted Virtualbox GUI with the right-click Run As Administrator, then succesfully rebooted the VM off the USB drive without trouble.
So if running on a USB drive fails with a Windows 7 host (maybe Vista, too both have UAC), try copying to an internally connected drive, or run Virtualbox as administrator.