virtualbox.org

Hi all,

After re-sizing (increase) of VHD file (Win7 host, WinXP Guest) from 30 to 50 GB I cannot start VM - FATAL: No bootable medium found! System halted.
I have tried attaching this VHD to another VM, and it shows empty unallocated space of 50GB.
I also tried recovery with GParted, no luck.

Any ideas on what to do?

Thanks!

Could be anything. Here's a tutorial on how to do it properly.

mpack wrote:Could be anything.Here's a tutorial on how to do it properly.

This is exactly what I did. The problem is that GParted sees only unallocated space.

The tutorial is correct, and there's no bug reported in VirtualBox. So if you followed the tutorial carefully then you shouldn't be having the problem.

Are you using snapshots?

mpack wrote:The tutorial is correct, and there's no bug reported in VirtualBox. So if you followed the tutorial carefully then you shouldn't be having the problem.

Are you using snapshots?

No, no snapshots.

In VB it shows following:
Virtual size 50.00 GB
Actual size: 29.29 GB

First, hopefully you made a backup and hence have the means to go backwards?

Are you using the "Windows Dynamic Disk" option inside the guest? Not to be confused with VirtualBox's dynamically allocated virtual disks, Windows Dynamic Disks are a feature of Windows, an alternative to the traditional MBR partitioning scheme. Unfortunately it involves hiding partition information in the last 1MB of disk space... which of course is not the last 1MB of disk space after you enlarge a disk.

It's a pity you're using VHD. This would probably be fixable (and perhaps wouldn't have happened at all) if you were using VirtualBox's native disk format.

How do I check this in Windows?


Also, I don't need to boot from this drive, I just need data.

I don't use dynamic disk so I'm not entirely certain how to observe that it's working, so the following is a guess.

Go into Disk Management, select the disk and notice the "Type" column. Mine all say "Basic". I've a feeling it might say something else in this column if dynamic disks were in use.

I suggest you Google for a non-guess answer, it obviously isn't a VBox question.

There are several partition recovery programs that can boot from an iso file, and if you use snapshot you can try each of them without risk. To name a few, Active@, DiskInternals, Paragon, Acronis, etc.

mpack wrote:Go into Disk Management, select the disk and notice the "Type" column

He can't actually do that because he can't even boot. My guess is that he hosed his hard drive for good. A mistake perhaps while following the HowTo. I'm not sure if data-recovery programs can help at this point...

To be more specific: a
fter resizing VHD file with

VBoxManage modifyhd "c:\VMs\WinXP.vhd" --resize 50000
and successful operation I cannot boot from this VHD:

FATAL: No bootable medium found! System halted.
Previous size was 29.9 GB. Host is Win7, guest on this VHD is WinXP.

When I run VirtualBox VM with linux live and GParted the VHD, it shows 50GB of unallocated space. On the other side, when I run linux live on Virtual PC and GParted VHD, it shows 7.9GB of unallocated space.

I have tried recovery by Gparted, no partitions found. I have tried recovery console from WinXP installation (fixmbr...) nothing changes.

I have a backup of VHD, but it's few months old, and I'd hate to do everything again (it was my DEV station).

I'm curious what size increasing actually does. Maybe there is a way to do it the other way around (shrinking)?

I'm open to any ideas

Jemal wrote:I have a backup of VHD, but it's few months old, and I'd hate to do everything again (it was my DEV station).

Three words of advice. 1) Backup, 2) backup your backup and then 3) backup the backup of the backup.

Jemal wrote:I'm curious what size increasing actually does. Maybe there is a way to do it the other way around (shrinking)?

Resizing affect the logical size of the HD. Shrinking is not implemented, directly at least (search for CloneVDI). Also check the manual about the --resize option.

I don't know of any tool which can reduce the capacity of a VHD. Perhaps such tools exist in the VirtualPC world where VHD is native, but if so I haven't heard of them.

The only approach I can think of is to create a new disk of the old size, you need to get the old size exactly correct, so it may be worth checking your old backup. Then attach the duff drive and the new one to a working VM and transfer the entire disk image between the two - obviously truncated at the size of the old disk.

A similar idea is to open the VHD using CloneVDI and dump the first N sectors to a .raw file, where N corresponds to the old drive size (in bytes/512). Again the size must be precise. Then get CloneVDI to clone the raw file to a VDI.

No promises that either will work.

If it does work then you can try using CloneVDI to expand the drive capacity. CloneVDI is much safer for this job since it always creates a clone. Never in-place and hence can never trash your original. Also CloneVDI is aware of Windows Dynamic Disks.

I am able to confirm this issue; attempting to resize [increase] the Dynamically Allocated Storage for a vhd resulted in the "FATAL: No bootable medium found! System halted" message upon boot. I performed the steps in the tutorial and after booting the virtual machine to a live partition utility, it states that all of the available space is unallocated.

Host OS: Linux Mint 15 Cinnamon 64-bit (Olivia)
VirtualBox: 4.3.6 r91406
GuestOS: Win XP Pro 64-bit with SP2
GuestOS Settings:

• System: Boot Order: CD/DVD, Hard Disk
• Storage: WinXP64.vhd (IDE Primary Master), Host Drive PLDS DVD+-RW (IDE Secondary Master), Passthrough checked and no image mounted.
• Snapshots: Current State (only)