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Installing Windows 7, cannot detect hard drive?

Posted: 9. Jun 2012, 19:06
by Robstaley
Hi guys,

I've recently wiped my hard drive and did a complete OS reinstall, and as such had to redo my Virtualbox setup.

I had no problems creating the virtual machine, until I actually booted it up and started to install Windows. It stops and gives me the message, "setup did not find any hard drives installed in your computer", and then I am forced to quit. I have my virtual drive set up and everything, I'm not sure why the machine can't seem to locate it.

Any idea what may be causing this?

Re: Installing Windows 7, cannot detect hard drive?

Posted: 9. Jun 2012, 19:44
by stefan.becker
I know why there will be no help: All Details are missing.

There are several versions form macos, windows, vbox. And there is a log file with infos from starting the guest.

Re: Installing Windows 7, cannot detect hard drive?

Posted: 10. Jun 2012, 11:45
by mpack
The error message means that you don't have a hard drive mounted in the VM, and contradicts what you say you've set up. I think users would notice if hard drives weren't being mounted, so I think I'm more inclined to believe the error message.

Perhaps you should post the relevant .vbox file here (that's the settings file from the VM folder): as a zipped attachment please. You might also include the VM log in the same zip. The log file is "VBox.log" from the Logs subfolder of the VM folder.

Re: Installing Windows 7, cannot detect hard drive?

Posted: 10. Jun 2012, 19:01
by michaln
mpack wrote:The error message means that you don't have a hard drive mounted in the VM, and contradicts what you say you've set up.
The OP could have been creative and used a storage controller not supported by Windows 7. Of course without any actual data, it's just a totally wild guess.

I have also seen very interesting error messages coming from truncated Win7 ISOs - you'd think Windows would detect that and tell you the installation media is corrupted, but in one case I got an error message claiming that a driver for the storage controller wasn't found. Getting a complete and uncorrupted ISO fixed that.