virtualbox.org

I think I have identified a potential bug. I am wondering if anyone else has encountered it or has any ideas. I am currently experimenting with a Windows 7 x64 system which was installed to, and boots from, iSCSI, meaning the C: drive is located on a NAS/SAN device. I installed VirtualBox 4.2.6 r82870 on this system recently. I was concerned during the installation process that the network driver installation might cause problems, obviously the network card cannot go down or the system loses access to the C drive and the system crashes (just as if you tore the drive out of a running system), but it did not crash and the install seemed to go normally without error messages. However, once I tried to actually use a VM I found that I could not bridge to the correct network adapter (there are two) as the main network adapter (Intel 82579LM) did not show up on the list of adapters available for bridging. Upon further inspection I see that the "Virtualbox Bridged Networking Driver" (the filter driver) did not install for that NIC which I assume is why I can't bridge to it.

Any thoughts on what I might do or try? Thanks!

Pure guess: but I'm thinking that it would be a neat trick to insert a filter into a driver stack without interrupting the work that the stack is doing. I imagine that is the source of your problems, and I don't see any obvious ways around it. I assume that the Windows image to be configured is on the server and hence you can't configure it "offline" (*).

(*) Similar problems can arise with local hard disks: you want to do surgery on the boot disk but it won't let you while the system is running, hence you temp boot from a PE disk etc. I don't know what the equivalent of that would be for you.

Well, I can boot to other systems over the network (including PE) of course so if there was a way to do it while the system was "offline" it could be done. I'm just not aware of tools that exist currently and would allow you to modify the network drivers of a non-running copy of Windows.