Installing XP on a virtual SATA drive

[Industrial]

I already did a fresh install on an IDE VDI but I heard SATA is faster with less overhead so I changed to a SATA controller in the settings but now I get a bluescreen whenever I boot up. Even with the XP SP3 ISO with a SATA RAID driver in a floppy it still gives me a bluescreen. What should I do?

[mpack]

See the tutorials area, Windows Guests.

[Industrial]

Never mind I got it, I didn't know the exact driver to use but I just found out Virtualbox emulates the Intel ICH8M AHC controller which is what I picked from the floppy. Sorry.

[Industrial]

Wait a minute it's not installing. It's taking forever and hanging at 39 minutes on "preparing install" and then ends in a bluescreen again. The hell is going on? I used the right driver.

[mpack]

Why not let XP choose the driver it wants?

Return the hard disk to the IDE controller, but leave the SATA controller attached to the VM. Boot the VM normally - forget the F6 floppy nonsense. When the "New hardware found" wizard pops up, choose "Have disk" and browse to wherever the SATA driver INF files are: that's either the floppy or a shared folder, whatever. The tutorials gave links to the correct drivers. Once XP is happy with the SATA controller you can then shut down and move the hdd to it.

If you want any more help then you need to start giving details, like the contents of the BSOD screen. To see it, in the guest turn off My Computer | Properties | Advanced | Startup and Recovery | Automatically restart.

[Industrial]

Ok I did that and now virtualbox takes 99% CPU usage when I boot up the XP VM with the VDI now attached to SATA. It doesn't ever reach the desktop.

[mpack]

Then it's a mystery. No-one else has reported a problem with SATA support.

They have however reported problems with XP Windows Update talking 100% CPU. And that's all XP systems, not just VMs.

See Minimum information needed for assistance.

[Industrial]

Version 4.2.6. No guest additions.
Host Windows XP SP3 32-bit (4GB)
Guest Windows XP SP3 32-bit (256MB)

[mpack]

00:00:02.222173 NumCPUs <integer> = 0x0000000000000008 (8)

Your Core-i7 860 CPU only has 4 cores, so assigning 8 to the guest is unlikely to be a wise move. Even if you mistook threads==cores, assigning all 8 threads to the VM is not good. What should the host run on? Anyway, is there some reason that your guest needs more than 1 core?

[Industrial]

I have hyperthreading so I thought I'd assign all 8. On my vbox settings there's a maximum of 16 and the green line stops at 8 so I thought this meant I was allowed to choose 8. It ran smoothly before with this setting and so does the Win7 VM. It should be idle most of the time so I didn't think I'd have to worry about 100% CPU usage. But okay, I'll use 4 from now on if that numbers means physical, not virtual cores.

Either way, changing this didn't help. I still get (now 50%) high CPU usage during the bootup and then a black screen.

[mpack]

You can't assign 4 either. Your host can't run on air! Why so many cores in the guest?

[Industrial]

I tried assigning just 1 as well and the problem remains.