Boot problem with Windows 7 VM on Mac OS X 10.8.5

[Waqqas]

Hi all,

I have a Windows 7 VM (32 bit) on my MAC OS X 10.8.5 which is not booting up. I am using Oracle Virtualbox 4.2.18 r88780 for my VM. The "Diagnosis and Repair Report" gives two root causes:

i. Boot critical file C:\Windows\system32\drivers\intelide.sys is corrupt.
ii. Boot critical file C:\PCIIDEX.SYS is corrupt.

Log file is attached. Please guide how I can get both these files back in order on the VM.

Windows 7 VM settings:
2 processors, 3584 MB RAM

Mac Book Pro Retina (mid 2012):
2.3 GHz Intel core i7, 16GB RAM

Thanks.

[noteirak]

Your problem seems to come form the guest OS, not from Virtualbox.
The VM log is normal, and the error is clearly a guest OS issue here, about some drivers being corrupted.
If you google it, you're not the ony one to have it, and few fixs are proposed.

Unless you can tell us why you think this is a Virtualbox issue directly?

[Waqqas]

Hi and thanks for your reply...

I am totally aware that this could be a problem of the Guest OS completely, and not VM. But here is the thing: this VM was saved on my portable HDD as a backup. The original one got deleted by accident. So, in VMWare, I did not remove the VM completely from VMWare but just removed the reference of the HDD that got deleted. Then I copied the backup to my computer and added this HDD to the same VM which it belonged to. And since then I have not been able to boot it up. I am able to access recovery options and menu, but it has never been able to boot up.

Observation: when I backed the VM up, it was from an older VMWare version. When I copied the backup again to the computer, VMWare version was newer than the one it was backed up on. Could this change of VMWare version create some problems in letting the VM start normally?

Keeping that in mind, now I am going to try to create a completely new VM in VMWare and add this HDD to it. Let's see what happens.

[noteirak]

When you say VMware, you mean Virtualbox or actually VMware?

[Waqqas]

No luck with that as well...

I am sorry, my mistake, it is Oracle VirtualBox and NOT VMWare. Apologies again.

Please give me some hint. I want to be able to use my backed up VM in VirtualBox again.

[noteirak]

If the backup was on an older version of Virtualbox (3.x), and you directly took that VM to a version 4, then yes it will be an issue. But none that you can't solve. I am no expert in this kind of work, but a little search on the forum would yield proper result - or maybe one of the other mods will give you a direct link (which I can't give you easily being on a smartphone right now)

Recreating a new VM and adding the disk is also a good idea, but you'll encounter re-activation issues within Windows.

[mpack]

If I can be blunt: not enough information is available to enable better advice. All the talk about VMWare makes me wary despite the correction, because the VM is indeed using a VMDK, which does suggest VMWare. If the OP can't say with precision what software is being used (and I'd want to know what software the backup was made from as well), then attempts to help will probably ramble on forever and get nowhere.

Getting a VMWare VM working in VirtualBox is a fundamentally different proposition from getting a VirtualBox v3 VM working in VirtualBox v4.

For the moment the only thing I can suggest is to make a clone of the VMDK, build a new VM around it (do NOT add to an existing VM), then boot that VM using a Win7 setup DVD and ask it to repair the installation.