virtualbox.org

Alright, I'll be the first to admit I know next to nothing about this sort of thing, so bear with me. I am trying to run windows 7 through my Mac OS X version 10.6.8. I believe I have all of the system requirements, I've taken all of the suggested settings for each prompt, and the descriptions in each seemed correct for what I'm doing. However, when I try to start the virtual machine, after giving me the opening screen that says VirtualBox right in the middle of it, it immediately goes to a black screen that says "FATAL: No bootable medium found! System halted." this occurred with both versions of windows 7 available AND windows 8.

Any ideas what I can do to solve this issue?

An update: The same message is also displayed for trying to start XP.

This indicates that your install media is missing or corrupt.

... come again?

You provide the install media. VirtualBox is only the application that allows you to install and run various operating system, which you must own. If you don't have the install media then that answers why there is not bootable media.

Ah... I suppose that makes sense... new question, though.

If both require you to have the exact same things, why is this any better than the copy of bootcamp that's built in with the mac?

Or, failing to get a response to that (be it due simply to time or to a lack of a good response), how do I uninstall all the stuff it just put on my computer?

Boot camp is basically a user-friendly approach to install several OS on the same host computer. That means that you must choose which one you want to run at the start, and they run on the physical hardware, directly accessing the physical ressources, and you could destroy the OSX part of the hard drive from the Windows OS per example, and vice versa.

Virtualbox, on the other hand, in a virtualization software. It means that the OS will run in some kind of sandbox, totally unaware of the actual OS and most of the hardware. You also can control the machine directly (pause, reset), you can take snapshots, and ultimetly, your second OS is simply a folder with some files, nothing more.

At the end of the day, they don't do the same thing. It's not a matter of whih one is better, they are just different, giving you different things for different use cases.
Now the question is : which one do you need? And to answer that, you would need to read more about virtualization and dual boot in general.

Emma1992 wrote:Or, failing to get a response to that (be it due simply to time or to a lack of a good response), how do I uninstall all the stuff it just put on my computer?

Emma, You must understand that responses are given in the best time that we can. For me I was out to lunch. You can't expect to always get immediate answers to a question although we do the best we can.

It took a whole 33 minutes to a get a technical support question answered, on a Sunday, for software you paid nothing for. That's just shocking...