virtualbox.org

Hi!

I received a VMware Windows 2008 64bit vmdk (2 disks) from a colleague. I can't get it to boot. It starts OK but ends up at a System Recovery screen each time. I read that vmdk images are supposed to work OK with VB. (I'm using VB4.1.2) However I can't seem to get it to work. Is there a trick to use vmdks?

I read the manual which doesn't have much info. I've read the forums and check Google but nearly every posting is from 2009 and earlier. I'm not sure what I have to do next. I'd prefer to use VB and not use VMware Fusion.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks.

I was able to get a screenshot of the error message before I started the reboot loop again.

Maybe this info can help??

Thanks and regards.

What would really help is some info on how the disks were created. Simply mounting a system disk (physical or virtual) and expecting it to boot is not realistic. It will only work if the machine it was created on and the machine you are booting on are very similar. You need some info on what virtual machine it was created on. You might then be able to configure your vm to be close enough to the original for the system to boot.

Thanks BillG.

The vmdk image was created using VMware Server on a Windows machine. I'm not sure the version of Windows or VMware.

I asked and received the vmware image RAM, OS info, video ram, etc. info so I could match closely in VB. I used those settings.

The image actually had 2 vmdk images. I connected the first image (called "Win2008") in VB to a SATA 0 and the second image (called "DATA") to SATA 1. The error and looping of system recovery happens with this setup. I tried to reverse the connection of the vmdk images but that won't boot at all.

Just to test the image integrity, I downloaded an evaluation copy of VMware Fusion 4.0.1.

I selected the (Win2008) vmdk and Fusion converted the Win2008 and DATA vmdk's into a file that opens and runs correctly in Fusion. The new file has extension ".vmwarevm".

While I'm happy the image works, I'm not happy that it is a proprietary vm format and not happy that I can't get it to run using VB. I don't want to buy Fusion if I don't have to.

Thanks for your help.

Have you tried converting it into a VDI ?

Stop 7B means that the installed system on the virtual harddisk doesn't have a driver for the storage controller / is expecting a different storage controller.
You would need to find out which kind of storage controller (IDE, SATA, SCSI...) was used in the virtual hardware of the VMware Server guest, maybe even which chipset (PIIX3, PIIX4, ICH9) and then try to configure the Virtulbox guest with similar features.

Martin - I was having the same problem - changing the controller to match the original physical machine's controller type fixed the issue - in my case I changed it to scsi. Thanks for the post.