vdi on external hard drive

[rvp]

I copied a VDI residing on the internal hard drive (HD #1) of my PC (PC #1) to an external USB hard disk (HD #2). I created a new virtual machine on another PC (PC #2) and associated the VDI on the external drive (HD #2) to this VM. When I run that VM, I just get a black unresponsive screen.

If I move the exact same VDI from HD #2 to an internal drive (HD #3) on PC #2, then the VM boots and works fine (to do this, of course, I had to remove association of the vdi on HD #2 to the VM and re-associate the file on HD #3 to the VM; also removing VDI on HD #2 from the list of known virtual disks).

Is it not possible for the VDI to reside on an external USB hard drive? If this is supported, how do I get it to work?

I want to run the VM on PC #2 but want to keep the VDI on HD #2 rather than HD #3 (if I keep it on HD #3, it will leave very little free space on that disk).

My VM OS is Ubuntu and the host OS is Windows 7 on both PCs. VBox version 4.3.2 r90405.

I searched the forum but I couldn't find any previous posts on this. If a solution or an explanation for this problem is discussed in a previous post, please point me to it.

Thanks in advance.

[mpack]

VirtualBox doesn't care what host drive a VDI is located on. You must have changed something in the VM recipe (e.g. changed IO APIC).

[rvp]

I didn't change anything. I tried this several times (with no changes in the VM other than which virtual hard drive is associated to the VM). When I move the vdi to internal hard drive, it works. When I move it to the external hard drive, it doesn't work. The vdi files on the two drives are identical. Any suggestions on how to diagnose the problem?

A few other data points:

When I associate the VDI on the external hard-drive to the VM, it takes a while. Virtual Box Manager is unresponsive for a minute or two before the drive shows up under "Storage"

I/O APIC is not enabled in my VM. I believe this is the default setting. Do I have to change it?

On the VirtualBox Manager, the status of the VM shows as running. When I try to power down the VM, it gets stuck at "Stopping the virtual machine... ".

[mpack]

Post a VM log file for the "bad" VM. For how, see the "Min info needed for assistance" howto (in howto forum). Normally I wld provide a link but I'm doing this on a tablet.

[Perryg]

Here you go Don.
Minimal information needed to be able to help

[mpack]

Thanks...