Win 7 guest in external HD Mac host

[obrien.james]

I have a 2014 MacBook Air, and wanted to run a win 7 installation that I have in VirtualBox every now and then.

I used VM's VCenter Converter to make a .VMDK image of my current Win 7 installation. I have now moved this to an external HD due to the file size and the MacBook Air having limited space.

I created a virtual machine in VirtualBox, and selected the option of use existing HD and selected the .VMDK file from the external HD (/Volumes/My Book/VM_Img/James-PC/James-PC.vmdk)

VirtualBox has no problems accessing this. Then I start the virtual machine and I get a BSOD followed by a automatic reboot of the Virtual Machine (I am not quick enough to see the BSOD error.) then the windows startup repair runs and then fails with an error of:

Repair action : system files integrity check and repair

Result : failed error code 0x490

I'm not sure why this is happening. I'm assuming that it is working in some way as I am able to boot the windows systems repair tool just not the windows installation

Any advice would be most gratefully received

James

[loukingjr]

if this was a Windows 7 bootcamp partition see this: How to Use a MacOS Bootcamp Partition as a VirtualBox Guest
If not use a better tool to image the original PC such as Disk2VHD.

[obrien.james]

Thanks for the response

No it's not a boot camp partition, it's a native win 7 installation.

I will try using Disk2VHD to make an image

James

[loukingjr]

YW. I've just read a few problems related to VM's VCenter Converter so I thought it is worth a shot.

[obrien.james]

Just so people are aware, I have sorted the issue now.

I used Disk2VHD to create a virtual copy of the HD. I had to make sure it was in the .VHD format, I also needed to mount the .vhd to VirtualBox to the IDE controller not the SATA

Windows boots without issue and then starts installing necessary drivers.

Thanks for all the help

James