virtualbox.org

I know you can boot to VirtualBox's guest BIOS. I've done it...and it required mashing "Del" immediately upon a guest restart. Yet on another PC I've put VirtualBox on I can't get it to take me to the guest BIOS to save my life...I've mashed "Del" as quckly as I possibly can but the bootup just flies right past the initial screen too fast.

I even tried things like "VboxManage modifyVM VirtualXPupstairs -–bioslogodisplaytime 10” in DOS while the guest OS was shut down to slow down the boot process (VirtualXPupstairs is what I named my guest). That command does nothing from what I can see.

Again, I know you can boot to guest BIOS because I've done it, so what gives?

It is F8, not Del. Some physical machines use the Del key.

BillG wrote:It is F8, not Del. Some physical machines use the Del key.

Sorry, that is to enter Safe Mode, not BIOS.

You cannot boot into the virtual BIOS. You change the settings of the vm from the VirtualBox Manager while the vm is shut down (Settings|System).

There would be no purpose to a user interface for the VBox BIOS: there is no CMOS to store changes in. The only place your preferences are stored is in the .vbox file, and as Bill points out, there are easier ways to modify that.

BillG is probably right about it not being possible on Virtualbox.

I realize now that I bet the reason I remember doing it on a virtual machine is because I tried out Windows Virtual PC before I settled on Virtualbox (I might've even briefly looked at a third one).

So it's still true that I know I booted to BIOS on a virtual machine (because I remember clearly how bizarro and terse the settings were--it was kind of cool, but I remember thinking also it was mostly useless), it's just it wasn't Virtualbox. Sorry about the confusion.

I need to access bios in my vm in order to set the wake-lan for a lab in my class. I tried going through the system while vm was down, it only gave the efi option which did not have the necessary choice. when I use F8, it is the boo mgr. Help please

Please read the thread before posting! As was already mentioned above, a virtual machine has no use for a BIOS user interface. Alternatively, you can consider the VM settings dialog pages to be your BIOS user interface.

p.s. I'm not aware that VirtualBox has a "wake on LAN" feature. If you consider how applicable such a feature would be to a VM, you might see problems with it.