virtualbox.org

Hello folks,

here's my situation: I run VirtualBox on a Win7 Host with a RHEL VM (SATA AHCI disk) and a Windows XP 32 bit VM (IDE disk).
For testing purposes, I'm trying to add the WinXP IDE disk to the existing RHEL VM (Settings > Storage > Add Hard Disk for IDE Controller).

My intention is to mount the Windows disk inside the Linux VM.

Unfortunately, every time I try to boot the Linux Guest it boots from the IDE disk instead of the SATA (Linux) disk. Even when I set the IDE hard disk to IDE Slave (Primary or Secondary), it still boots up Windows XP. When I hit F12 right after turning on the VM and choose to boot from SATA AHCI (Option #2), I only get an underscore prompt (_), but then nothing happens.

Any ideas?

Make sure none of the partitions on the IDE drive are marked as bootable. That should fix it.

Long term, you might want to check the grub boot script in your Linux VM, see how it chooses the boot partition.

Isn't there another way to accomplish what I'm trying to do? If I make the IDE disk unbootable, I can not boot Win XP anymore

Mark the IDE storage controller as not bootable in the Linux VM - see vboxmanage storagectl

Hmm. You'd have to remember that you can't boot from IDE CDs either.

If you want to retain the ability to boot from either OS then it looks like your grub script needs a boot menu - and may need to be relocated to the IDE drive to guarantee it'll get executed.

I believe the OP doesn't want to boot from the IDE drive in the Linux VM while retaining the ability on the Windows VM.
The issue is that IDE seems to be checked first in the boot list for VirtualBox, so you would only need to prevent booting from IDE in the Linux VM (since the linux data is on SATA).
While I don't know how to prevent that in the VirtualBox boot itself, I think disabling the boot flag on the storage controller is a good option here.