virtualbox.org

I have been at this for a few days now. I love that Vbox can support all sorts of different virtual hard drives, and I have alot of success with .vdi, .vhd...BUT I am having one issue, and it is .vmdk. I believe these machines were built in older versions of VMware and wondering if I can get them to work in virtualbox?

What happens:

-I can build the machine, and attach the hard drive.
-when I boot it up, it begins and shows the "loading windows 2000" or "loading windows xp"
-Then it freezes! the screen never progresses, it seems as if the HDD stops spinning leaving the bootup process at the same point every time!


I appreciate all of the help!

There's a difference between supporting a particular virtual drive format, and supporting what is on the drive. In particular the VMWare tools are not supported. You need to uninstall those, if you can. Then install the VirtualBox Guest Additions to replace them.

This is, I guess, also behind the mouse problems in the other thread you created.

Thanks for the speedy response. I hate to ask what might be an obvious question, but how would I remove the vmware tools? My assumption is that your talking on the VM not the Host box, as I have never installed VMware tools on my host machine. And I cant tell you how I would go about removing the tools from a VM that I cant open?

thanks again, hopefully its simple and I'm just looking past it...

Patrick

All discussion is about what you do inside the VM. The host is mostly irrelevant.

Another thing to watch for when porting a VMWare VM is that VMWare defaults to having the "IO APIC" feature enabled, while VirtualBox defaults to having it disabled. There is no correct setting for this feature, but if Windows XP is installed with IO APIC then it must remain enabled, or the VM will not boot.

Other than that you need to ensure that the VM recipe is as close as possible to the VMWare version. Oh, and select an IDE disk controller, do not use SATA.

The easiest way to get rid of the VMWare tools is to do it while running as a VMWare VM. Short of that, I would try to get it to boot in safe mode as a VBox VM, and use the Control Panel and Device Manager to uninstall VMWare services and roll back drivers to native XP ones.

thanks again...

I feared you would say most of that...I possibly will have to setup vmware on another machine and try that out. I cant boot it into any mode. All it will do is get to the first boot screen (and in windows 2000 it even progresses through all of the bars fililng up) and then it freezes every time...booting in safemode or anything else results in back screen.

Again thanks for the clarifications on things, I gotta get use to the norms, verbage etc so I can follow faster!

mpack...I have to apologize. I forgot that I performed the change of the "IO APIC" when I was installing a MAC OSX box, so I went back and changed it to the previously failed .vmdk drives. Good news is one booted up and all seems good with that one. Bad news is that I got a blue screen of death after initial windows 2000 boot up screen...saying inaccessible_boot_device...doesnt let me boot into any safe mode or anything...so maybe I might be out of luck with this one!



thanks again

You might want to search these forums for Windows 2000 tips (specify site:forums.virtualbox.org). I have a vague memory of bugs related to the boot disk size, but I may be wrong. I was never a Win2K user so I don't remember the specifics.

Edit:  Actually I think the bug I was remembering was the race condition that's mentioned in the user manual section 12.3.3 - which evidently only affects the VM during installation. I assume you made sure that the VM was configured to IDE and not SCSI or SATA hdd controller. There's also the MergeIDE fix, which was needed for XP and presumably therefore for Win2K also, to avoid problems when changing IDE controllers.