virtualbox.org

Hello my friends

I am new here, and I hope I don't ask something which was answered already

Before upgrading to Win 10 I want to virtualize my existing Win 7 64 Bit with all my Software. So I used Disk2Vhd for creating a VHD image on an external USB Drive. The image has 250 GB (the initial partition C has 1 GB). Then for testing I installed Virtual Box on a second PC (I learnt, that I cannot start the same Win 7 on the same PC). I created a Win 7 64 Bit Virtual Machine and mounted the vhd from the USB Disk as external source. Now I get always "fatal error no bootable medium found system halted". But boot device is set on Disk.

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks for your support.

Best regards from Prague

Heinz

When you Disk2VHD'd the PC, did you process the entire disk or just certain partition(s)? I recall reading such problems coming from not Disk2VHDing the whole disk, and the master boot record is missing, which would cause the "no bootable medium" error.

You should be able to run the Disk2VHD'd guest on the same or another host, all the hardware will change to Virtualbox hardware regardless of the host you use and you will very likely have to re-activate your guest Windows OS. If your Windows was OEM from Dell or HP or some other big company you might not be able to re-activate - they lock their OSs to the physical PC BIOS.

Hi + thx

I virtualized only Part. C with the OS, there was a recovery partition I didn't take.

And, yes, I have a HP All in-one-PC, so there is no chance to virtualize this OS?

Try again with the whole disk. There may be a way to fake the bios to look like the physical PC's bios using something called DMI, which Virtualbox has commands to modify, but I don't know how to do it.

If the virtualizing won't work, consider transferring the programs and data to a fresh install of Windows 7.

I would not expect frigging with DMI to be enough to make it think it had a different BIOS.

That said, I've have virtualized an HP edition of Windows before and had no problem (i.e. when I bought my current PC I migrated the retail XP license from my previous PC, and - just because I could - I used the bundled Vista CD to create a VM... which I've never used since). The only additional step is that I had to insert the physical CD into a host drive and enable passthrough mode in order to verify it: an ISO image of the CD would not work. Others have reported different results. The only way to be sure if the installation will activate is to try it. And make sure the license is not already used, e.g. by the host.