Booting a VirtualBox to Acronis 11.5 PE disc

Discussions related to using VirtualBox on Windows hosts.
mpack
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Joined: 4. Sep 2008, 17:09
Primary OS: MS Windows 10
VBox Version: VirtualBox+Oracle ExtPack
Guest OSses: Mostly XP

Re: Booting a VirtualBox to Acronis 11.5 PE disc

Post by mpack »

daemorok wrote:This however has revealed a new problem. The hard drive containing the Acronis image file gives the "Disk is not formatted" error when attempting to browse it. The disk works in the host OS (windows 7 64).
What does that mean? The VM should not be accessing physical host drives, the host cannot access virtual guest drives. The main drive that BartPE sees when you boot up a new VM is the virtual drive, and yes it is unformatted, but that isn't a concern since Acronis is going to zap its contents anyway.

If you need access to an Acronis image then it must on a USB drive, or in a network shared folder, or a second drive attached to the VM (I know this works so I don't know what you did - looking at the wrong drive would be my guess). The image can't be on the virtual drive you are about to overwrite! I had a long investigation of this problem back when I was a relative newbie myself. We eventually found several solutions.
daemorok
Posts: 10
Joined: 2. Jul 2012, 20:32

Re: Booting a VirtualBox to Acronis 11.5 PE disc

Post by daemorok »

I checked through that thread and the trick with when to plug the USB drive in helped. I was able to restore and successfully boot the VM.
Thanks
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