Medium not found - disk2vhd of windows 8.1 guest

[H0wdy]

Hello,

I used disk2vhd to make a .vhd file from a new windows 8.1 installation, 64 bit.

When I copy it to a host computer running Linux, and then try to open it in virtual box after creating a new VM, it says no bootable medium found.

It seems to have transferred fine, as I can load it as another hard drive on another virtual machine I have.

So I inserted a win 8 recovery disk, and I boot to command prompt. It seems to be a UEFI system.

I tried such things as:

bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /scanos
bootrec /rebuildbcd (giving a system not found error)

after which it gives a different error on boot, FATAL: INT18: BOOT FAILURE.

If I use diskpart and list partitions, it shows that all the hidden partitions were indeed transferred over.

However, if I try to have the recovery DVD automatically fix, it fails.

Any ideas?

[H0wdy]

I clicked the enable EFI box, but I keep going to EFI shell. What to do?

[mpack]

Last I heard, Windows guests can't use VirtualBox EFI. The latter was designed for OS X, Linux apparantly works too, but not Windows.

[Perryg]

EFI support for Windows guests was added around 4.3.* and tested to work. But if the guest was not created with UEFI it would not work as EFI in VirtualBox AFAIU.

In any case this would be an issue for the disk2vhd folks because they are creating the image that does not boot.

[scottgus1]

Even if you do get it running, Windows will ask to reactivate, which I have read will eventually unactivate the source PC.