[Solved] Open physical drives with Virtualbox?

[Industrial]

I have a problem with my windows XP host. I accidentally uninstalled my USB drivers which disabled my keyboard and mouse so I had no choice but to repair install but the CD brought up numerous copy errors (CD is not corrupted, I checked) so it didn't install properly. I even made a copy of the CD as a folder on the C drive to point it to the files it complains failed to copy but with no avail. My question is can I open my C drive from Virtualbox somehow so I can do the repair install from there. I can't tell you how much I hate these useless, unreliable decaying CDs and USB drives. Virtual CDs are awesome, I never got a single copy error when installing a VM.

On the other hand I did have problems installing XP on a SATA drive on a VM which went far less smooth than on a real SATA HDD so I'm wondering if this is a good idea at all even if I could pull it off? What do you guys think?

[socratis]

Let me see if I understood this right:
- You damaged your XP host's installation.
- You have VBox installed.
- You want to run VBox in order to access your host's hard drive to repair the XP installation.

Does the description above correctly describes the problem?

[Industrial]

That's correct. I don't have Vbox installed elsewhere though. I would have to install on another separate partition to access drive C with but yes you got it.

[socratis]

Let me reply with a car analogy:
- Your car's battery is dead.
- Your car has a lighter outlet.
- You want to use the lighter outlet's electricity to start your car.

[Industrial]

So it's a bad idea? I just wanted to use a virtual CD drive. It turns out the repair install didn't really fail though with the exception of one file that got a copy error. But now I can't use the Windows Component Wizard because I'm getting the same copy errors... even if I put the i386 folder on my HDD. Is there an alternative way to fix this if using vbox is a bad idea? I dont feel like installing on a new partition anyway.

[scottgus1]

I think you'll run into trouble trying to use Virtualbox to do what you want. First thing, as Socratis was probably trying to point out, you're going to need a different host XP installation to run Virtualbox before you could attempt to fix your broken XP installation. Which means you'll need to fix the copy errors on your install disc first. Which, if you can, means you'll be able to fix the original XP without Virtualbox.
Virtualbox can read physical drives, yes. It's called Raw Hard Disk Access (section 9.8.1 in the user manual). It's very likely to hose the data on the drive if not done exactly right and is for experts only.
Even if you try to get it working and succeed, you'll be configuring the operating system for the simulated hardware Virtualbox presents to the OS, not the physical hardware in the PC. So the OS will still not work just right.
As a thought, could you try to use a different CD drive? Maybe the install CD and drive are just a little out of tolerance with each other.

[Industrial]

I forgot about the part about virtual hardware, never mind. That would invalidate the repair install because then I'd have to do another one from an actual CD to make the windows isntallation correspond to the actual hardware. Sigh, this is a lost cause. Is there ANY possible way of running a virtual CD on boot? USB stick won't work with windows XP install ISO.

I don't really need to repair install right now but I do need to install windows components with appwiz.cpl which complains of copy errors from files on the CD or even legitimate files from the CD residing on the HDD. This is extremely annoying and I'm going in circles.

[scottgus1]

About the only thing I could say is try a different physical CD drive. The copy you're making on the hard drive depends on good data from the CD drive, which if not reliable is not going to give good data on the hard drive copy. Since you're tring to install Windows components, you might be able to try someone else's CD, as long as it's the same version & service pack.

[Industrial]

No, I burned the CD with the official ISO available from Microsoft's website. I know for a fact the files arent corrupted. It alternates between which files it complains about anyway. Sometimes its mspaint.ex_ sometimes mspaint goes thru but something else fails.

[scottgus1]

You could try mounting the ISO as a virtual drive then, using a iso-mounting software, and skip the CD altogether. I use SlySoft's free one: http://www.slysoft.com/en/virtual-clonedrive.html.
I see that the original problem is you uninstalled the USB drivers. If I recall correctly, XP keeps a copy of drivers on the hard drive, so it should be able to pull them from there. Are you seeing unknown hardware in your Device Manager? What happens when you scan for hardware changes? can you boot to safe Mode? Maybe there's other simpler drivers it uses in that mode.
Or is the problem that you can't use the computer within XP because your keyboard and mouse are usb, and all you can get at is the text-based installer? If so, you might have to get a PS2 keyboard if you have the PS2 jack.

[Industrial]

Can the virtual CD drive be mounted outside of Windows when I do an install/repair install? That would be great. I already know how to mount virtual CDs and I did so when trying to add/remove windows components but I still got copy errors.

Forget the USB drivers, the repair install re-installed them so that's all good now but this repair install is what caused the current mess with all my accessories being uninstalled from that stupid windows components manager. I've been told I have bad RAM but it passed the memtest86+ test, now I've been instructed to run it for 10 hours to be sure. I suppose I can do it overnight but my bet is that it will pass with no error. For once I'm actually hoping it does fail with an error so I can have an actual answer to this problem and get new RAM.

[scottgus1]

Interesting trick, mounting the iso during the repair install. I don't know if that can be done. Regaring the ram, maybe the installer uses a part of ram not normally used by the OS itself. One thing you could try is swapping the ram sticks. Other than that, I wouldn't know what else to do...

[Industrial]

WOW GUESS WHAT. I copied my partition, converted it to a VDI and tried a repair install inside the VM and... COPY ERRORS. Now I know for a fact its not a hardware issue. It's something on my system that's the problem.

[Industrial]

The problem is resolved. secedit.sdb was corrupted. Running esentutl /p %windir%\security\database\secedit.sdb in CMD fixed the problem in case anyone's interested. Without the power of Virtualbox that allowed me to easily move back and forth between snapshots I never would've isolated this culprit. God bless lord Vbox.