virtualbox.org

Hello

I've been using VB for a few years (excellent btw, used the Parallels and VM too, hands down a winner) but I have a strange issue with my XP vdi.
It's an original XP.vdi install on a mac host and it mostly works well, usually for weeks on end.

Then for no obvious reason, when trying to start the machine, I get 'error loading operating system' and that's as far as I get.
I have to go delete the vdi and drag my backup across and off we go again.

It's not a major crisis as I always keep back ups and I have 7, 8 and Unbuntu too, none of which exhibit the same behaviour, but it is mildly irritating.

Anyone know what causes it and if it can be resolved?

Thanks.

It sounds like (virtual) disk corruption. That would have many causes, e.g. cutting the power, running out of host disk space, some kind of host disk glitches etc. Have you run a host disk check?

Hi
I've done a host disk check, all seems well.
However, I have seemingly induced the error.

I ran disk defragment on the XP machine and, being as this was the only thing I did, restart the machine and got the error message.

In terms of low level disk operations (read/write/seek) as seen by VirtualBox, there's nothing special about a disk defragment process run inside the guest - except that it will tend to inflate a dynamic VDI, plus of course it moves data around so if your host disk has a bad sector, this might cause it to be hit. I had a recent problem of exactly that kind myself, I eventually replaced the hard disk.

A quick disk check on the host only tests filesystem structures, it will not find bad sectors. To do that you normally have to select a "thorough check" or other wording along those lines (I'm not a Mac user, I can't tell you the exact wording).

Virtual disk image files are of course very large, making it more probable that these will be affected by bad sectors on the host drive.

Get support from tutorial: http://tinyurl.com/Error-Loading-Operating-System