virtualbox.org

Hey there,

I'm on windows vista, 64-bit, 4gig thinkpad. My settings are attached, not sure what I'm missing here but I'm sure its quite simple.

Thank you in advance.

I have a dumb question perhaps but did you actually install Vista onto the virtual drive? if so, was it from a Vista install disk or?

Edit: I just noticed under Storage it lists [CD/DVD] Host Drive 'D:'. Did you try and mount a hard drive to the CD controller?

This is where Im seeking guidance, how to finalize the installation.. Where do I get the vista on a disk? This is why I posted here to figure this out. So no your question is not stupid, the instructions n manual are not very proficient if you don't have the necessary tools to make the manual work.

What else am I missing and where do I get it?

RenoSEO wrote:This is where Im seeking guidance, how to finalize the installation.. Where do I get the vista on a disk? This is why I posted here to figure this out. So no your question is not stupid, the instructions n manual are not very proficient if you don't have the necessary tools to make the manual work.

What else am I missing and where do I get it?

well, since you are on a PC running Vista you should have an install disk. but if you don't, you would have to have the disk replaced, buy a new one, or image the install you have to another drive or a USB thumb drive. then use that image to install it as a guest in VirtualBox.

on second thought your PC may not have come with an install disk but Vista could be on a recovery partition. I can't remember how far back that practice started.

VirtualBox allows you to run a virtual machine as well as the OS which is running on the physical machine. That is really all that it does. What you then do with that virtual machine is up to you.

This is not like buying a new machine from a computer shop. What you get is the equivalent of a bare machine straight from the factory. If you want to do anything useful with it, you have to obtain and install an operating system. If you want to use a Windows OS you need the Microsoft installation media, either on a CD/DVD or as an ISO file on your host machine. If you want to run some other operating system like Ubuntu you also need the install media in one of those forms. You will then be able to boot up the vm.

I am running Windows 7 -64 bit and I have installed VirtualBox-5.0.12-104815-Win.exe
I purchased the computer from Dell so the OS came preinstalled.
When I attempt to start the Vbox, I get "no bootable media found"

During the installation of VBox, I
1. created a virtual hard disk
2. selected VDI dynamically allocated
3. name - vbox, size = 25G
4. vbox starts powered off
5. Under settings Storage = Controller SATA, vbox.vdi
6. There are no dmg, iso or cdi files

What do I do now?

Do you understand what a VM is? It is a separate (simulated) PC. Imagine it as a second physical PC sitting to the right of your host PC. Now consider what the answer to your question would be in the latter case: quite obviously, the fact that your left PC came preinstalled with an OS does not help you install an OS on the PC on the right. You need an OS setup CD/DVD. Also, it probably can't be the version of Windows that you're running on your host, because Microsoft considers a VM to be separate hardware for the purpose of licensing, and attempting to activate the OS on the VM would cause problems for the VM and the host.

If you want to install Windows then you can buy a license, or reuse a discarded license. If you want to install Linux then install CD images (a.k.a. ISO images) are readily available for free download.