Win7 guest installation roadblocks on an UEFI Debian system

[dabeegfarmer]

I have been trying to setup a Win7 guest on my UEFI Debian system.

Because the system is UEFI there needs to be a couple quite small partitions at the beginning of the hard disk. If I understand things correctly my Blu-ray drive (sole optical drive has R/W in all optical media) somehow also needs a special designation.

Am looking for this as a result of the installation procedure halting and saying it needs to find drivers for the optical disc player and that it isn't finding any on the Win7 install disc.

Running on a PX97 motherboard with lots of ram, using a 1 TB drive for the various working systems and a 2 TB array for RAID storage if those facts impact needed procedures.

I have not been able to find any information on both the user and the technical documents re: UEFI system setup. Is there being any work to change this?

Dee

[Perryg]

Your guest is not going to see a UEFI anything. It is created inside a large container file on the hard drive. If you are seeing missing drivers upon install the media is more than likely corrput. Check the md5sum and/or download the install file again

[dabeegfarmer]

Your guest is not going to see a UEFI anything. It is created inside a large container file on the hard drive. If you are seeing missing drivers upon install the media is more than likely corrput. Check the md5sum and/or download the install file again

So the only thing that can be a problem is that my official MS Win7 Pro disc is corrupt.

Hmmmmm - - - not a single visible scratch on the back side of the DVD.

So as its a printed DVD there would seem to be another problem and as when I needed to do another install on the Linux side of things this UEFI was a real pain (and HAD to be used) I'm still back at my question.

[Perryg]

Fair enough but the UEFI issue is created by you. You do not need to select EFI mode in the guest as it is only for Mac and Linux. It will not work for Windows and is not needed.

Create a new guest and leave everything set to default and start the guest so it uses the first run wizard. Add the CD/DVD and see what happens.

[scottgus1]

One thing to remember when setting up a guest in Virtualbox is that your guest will typically not see any hardware your host has, except the CPU. In the default settings for a guest, all the other stuff will be simulated.

So just because your host has a SATA drive doesn't mean your guest needs to be set to SATA - the guest can be set to IDE and it will work just fine. Your host may have a UEFI bios, but Windows guests don't have to be set (and should not be set) to UEFI. The default network card Virtualbox chooses for your guest will very likely not be the kind of network card your host has, if it has one at all (many are on the motherboard now), but the guest will access the network just fine. and on and on it goes...

Often the best thing to do is to just use what Virtualbox selects for the guest in its New Guest template for the OS you're installing. (I do find, though, that the default memory is usually a little light for how I'd run my guests, and it may default to one processor, whereas my modern Windows guests typically run better with two.)

[dabeegfarmer]

The solution was somewhat different than I had anticiapted and also different that what had been suggested.

I did NOT need to use UEFI.
Win7 said it wanted drivers - - - what it actually wanted was formatting and partitioning.

Linux is quite clear that this is a necessary step but I had to search for this and when I stumbled upon it - - - well things made sense.

After the formatting and partitioning installation was straightforward.

Thanking all responders for their ideas and hopefully someone else following this at some later date can make use of my bobbles!

Dee