virtualbox.org

@mcbsys,

It may just be one of those things. I have imported from VPC2007 and the only prep I had to take was removing the special drivers that VPC installed before connecting the VHD to the guest. I have not tested this on newer versions of VPC if they exist.

Now this I have seen cause issues "My physical keyboard is PS/2 attached through a KVM that converts to USB" and may explain why the drivers appear to be equal but without looking at registry keys I don't know how you would tell. It might be as simple as a conversion that is not translating properly.

Thanks Perryg.

I'm using "Windows Virtual PC," the successor to VPC 2007. Windows Virtual PC was, IIRC, released with Windows 7. It's the first version to support USB through its Integration Components, and is the basis for the XP Mode feature of Windows 7. It works quite well for Windows, but I've come to rely on VB for Ubuntu. Unfortunately if you accidentally try to start a VPC VM and a VB VM at the same time, the host instantly crashes with a blue screen. So I thought I'd try to consolidate my VMs under VB to avoid that problem and occasionally to allow running Ubuntu and Windows VMs simultaneously.

BTW, in VB, I booted from an XP SP2 CD while the VPC image was attached and hit R to load the Recovery Console. The console seemed to display for about a second, then the machine instantly rebooted (no blue screen).

I'll fiddle around some more. Maybe downgrading the image to VPC 2007 first will help.

Mark

The newer version of VPC also supports VT-x/AMD-v, which is why you can not run them together. Only one application can use hardware-v at a time.
I have never used that version myself but have heard that the conversion from the new version to VBox is shall I say a lot different and harder. Some say impossible, but I have seen others that got it to work.

From the sounds of it the recovery console and VirtualBox are trying to run but if the XP mode drivers are active (even with VPC shut down) it probably is the cause of your nemesis.

XP Mode does use a Windows Virtual PC image, and can allow loading a single app in the XP Mode VM without the user seeing the whole VM client. However all of that depends on the Integration Components, which are no longer installed on this image.

Thanks for the explanation re. the VT-x/AMD-v conflict. Wish that both VPC and VB would check if the hardware is available before attempting to load. I thought about trying to write a batch file that checks for a running VPC process before allowing VB to load a client. Hmm...so maybe if I disable VT-x in VB, it won't conflict?

mcbsys wrote:...so maybe if I disable VT-x in VB, it won't conflict?

Nope, that didn't work. Without VT-x, Ubuntu didn't want to start at first, so I told VB to send it the shutdown signal. It flashed a message about the BIOS, then started Ubuntu. When I then started a VPC image, the host blue-screened.

mcbsys wrote:Did I misunderstand that part of the purpose of VirtualBox natively supporting VHD drives was to allow for easier transitions from a VPC environment?

I don't know if you misunderstand or not. I've never seen the devteam give explicit reasons for implementing VHD support.

But just to be clear: it's VHD support, not support for anything you might install on a VHD, such as VPC additions and drivers (whether they appear as explicit kbd/mouse drivers or not). The latter will never run under anything except VPC, and you have to get rid of them.

You may have to try that "Repair installation" idea.

mcbsys wrote:Did I misunderstand that part of the purpose of VirtualBox natively supporting VHD drives was to allow for easier transitions from a VPC environment

Yes, you did. "Easier" does not mean "always supported". It's not hard to have VHDs which work under both Virtual PC and VirtualBox, and it's also not hard to have VHDs which don't. It's up to the user to ensure that the VHD does not do things which will make it unusable under one or the other environment when moving the VHD.

The VirtualBox Guest Additions are designed such that the drivers do no harm if the image is booted in a different environment. If The VPC additions don't work that way, it's not something we can fix.

mpack wrote: But just to be clear: it's VHD support, not support for anything you might install on a VHD, such as VPC additions and drivers (whether they appear as explicit kbd/mouse drivers or not). The latter will never run under anything except VPC, and you have to get rid of them.

You may have to try that "Repair installation" idea.

Thanks, but unfortunately, I can't get to the Repair prompt (see my post to Perryg above). Also AFAIK, XP does not offer an auto-repair like Win7.

If I have time, I'll try converting some other images, or maybe downgrade this image to VPC 2007 to see if that removes conflicting drivers. Come to think of it, I might be able to use Driver Verifier to identify the conflict.

michaln wrote:Yes, you did. "Easier" does not mean "always supported". It's not hard to have VHDs which work under both Virtual PC and VirtualBox, and it's also not hard to have VHDs which don't. It's up to the user to ensure that the VHD does not do things which will make it unusable under one or the other environment when moving the VHD.

Thanks for the clarification. I assume the same would apply to migrating from any environment (VMWare, P2V, whatever). I'll just have to approach this as if I was trying to get XP to work on dissimilar hardware.

mcbsys wrote:I assume the same would apply to migrating from any environment (VMWare, P2V, whatever).

Yes. In all those cases, an "imported" VM is not guaranteed to be usable unless the virtualized hardware is close enough to what the guest expects, and there may be drivers for "foreign" hardware interfering even then.

Unfortunately the best way to fix it is for customers to push VMware/Microsoft/whoever to fix their guest tools to not block the system when it's booted on "other" hardware (virtual or physical).

I'll just have to approach this as if I was trying to get XP to work on dissimilar hardware.

Exactly. It's a lot like taking a hard drive out of one system and plugging it into another.

Re being unable to reach the "Repair installation" thing.

You should be able to boot the VM from a setup CD - in that situation the VHD isn't even being used until you kick off the install or repair, so nothing on the VHD should stop the VM booting. I see you mentioned earlier that an IDE controller is selected, that's good. When you say you booted off a CD, do you mean a physical CD or an ISO? If not the latter then you might give it a try.

mpack wrote:Re being unable to reach the "Repair installation" thing.

You should be able to boot the VM from a setup CD - in that situation the VHD isn't even being used until you kick off the install or repair, so nothing on the VHD should stop the VM booting. I see you mentioned earlier that an IDE controller is selected, that's good. When you say you booted off a CD, do you mean a physical CD or an ISO? If not the latter then you might give it a try.

I booted from a physical CD (XP Pro SP2). Booted fine, loaded drivers etc. (black screen with progress bar). I think it found the Windows installation on the VHD because it gave me options which included repairing (R). When I pressed R, it rebooted. I don't have an XP ISO. I guess could create one from this (or another) CD.

Tried two more conversions today:

• I copied the VHD from another XP Pro SP3 machine, created a new VB machine, changed only the network (to Bridged), and started the machine. It came up, mouse was erratic but keyboard was fine. Then I realized I had forgotten to uninstall the VPC integration components. So I did that while it was running under VB, then installed the VB additions, and all seems fine.
• Next I tried converting a Win7 machine. It was throwing blue screens (0x0000007B error) until I realized I needed to change from the VB Win7 default SATA to IDE. After that, startup failed, it automatically rebooted into repair mode, which took awhile, but then the machine came up fine. Interesting that mouse integration works without installing VB guest additions.

I think I'm going to give up on the one XP VM matching the thread title: "keyboard and mouse dead for vhd in virtualBox." I've tried more stuff, like uninstalling System device drivers, even uninstalling the keyboard and mouse, to no effect. I have not tried downgrading the image to VPC 2007. Another option, if I really needed this machine, would be to use a backup program like ShadowProtect that supports restoring to dissimilar hardware.

One thing different about this VPC VM is that I often used it with Undo Disks. Theoretically that should not affect the base VHD, however.

As much as I hate leaving technical problems unresolved, this is my simplest machine, so just installing a new one from scratch in VB would be faster than continuing to play driver wack-a-mole on this image. The really complicated machine, loaded with a full software development environment, was a breeze to convert (see previous post).

Thanks all for your suggestions.

Mark