Open Windows .vdi on a Mac?

[sonix]

I've recently bought a Mac and have installed VBox but want to open the VMs I created on my Windows PC (Win XP). I've copied them to the Mac (Snow Leopard) but when I try to Add the VM and select the files they are grayed out and can't be selected. Is it possible to do this?

[Perryg]

Moving to Mac as host.

[mpack]

You need to know what you're doing when moving VMs between differet host OS's, especially when it's a Windows guest. The main problem is that the .vbox file may contain references to host folders, USB devices, network adapters etc that do not exist (or have different names) on the Mac host.

If you know what you're doing then you can manually edit the .vbox file: not really recommended unless you REALLY know what you're doing.

Otherwise, the best solution is to create a new VM around the original hard disk image file (VDI). This is not practical if the old VM uses snapshots, so those would have to be deleted on the original host first. Make the new VM recipe as close as possible to the old one, taking particular notice of IO APIC setting, RAM size, IDE controller type, and virtual MAC address.

Expect the XP guest to want to be re-activated.