virtualbox.org

Hello !

I just completed the installation of VB 5.0.12 on a brand new desktop.
The host is Windows 10 Pro 64 bit ; the guest is Windows XP Pro SP3 32 bit.
My ultimate goal is to have the VM run my old XP with all its apps without resorting to a step-by-step installation ; I thought it would be relatively easy to accomplish since in the old desktop the "system" C: was on a unique separate drive/HDD.
So I proceeded a little differently from the VB User Manual :
- I had CASPER pump an image (.vhd) of my complete old HDD into a dedicated folder in the C: drive of the new computer
- I used the VB pane for instructing ("Storage") the IDE controller to point at my .vhd file

When I start the VM the following happens :
- I can see the initial screens of the guest, until the advanced options where you have to choose between "start XP normally" / "Windows repair console" / "Safe start"
- on "start XP" I have an immediate freeze and a black guest screen forever
- on "safe start" I see the guest unrolling a long list of... (what are they ? dll's ?) and then freeze
- on "repair console", the console works fine, I have launched a "chkdsk" which has worked as it should.

I am an absolute beginner with virtual machines and unable to think of a diagnosis...
Your suggestions and help will be highly appreciated, believe me.
Many thanks !

See this: Migrate existing Windows installations to VirtualBox

@ scottgus1

Thank you for rushing to my rescue, but... the link that you posted does not work and I fail to find the thread with this title in the "Howtos...". Can you show me the path ?
Greetings

@ scottgus1

Today the link works.
I have printed and am going to apply soon all that is said ; but I have a concern : why the last sentence "10. Reinstall patches (Service packs) and updates / 11. Install guest additions" ? If I convert straight from the old drive, I have everything I need already installed ? Wrong ?

Many thanks and greetings

That depends on whether the old machine was up to date. You certainly won't have the guest additions, because they are only installed in a virtual machine.

You may have to do a repair install of the OS (from the original install disc) to get it to boot. The "hardware" of a vm is very different from the original physical machine where the OS was previously installed.

You can also ignore the bits about dd and convertfromraw. You would use Disk2VHD to image the entire source drive (after running MergeIDE on the original machine). You might be able to use Casper as well, I don't know, I've never heard of it.

Thanks to all of you !

Finally, I pumped again my entire "old" system drive into an external USB drive, but this time I used CASPER for what I have always done with it : I cloned, I did not image.
(Before that, as mpack writes, I had done the mergeide trick on the old machine)
And then Disk2VHD for imaging into ...\VirtualBox VMs\GUESTNAME\IMAGENAME.vhd and everything worked !

Not everything actually, as I am still fighting to obtain that the VM instructs my display to achieve its max resolution (1920x1200 px) ; it seems at the present time that it cannot feed into the guest's display properties a resolution corresponding to this aspect ratio (16x10) : I am always brought back to 1536x960 px by the auto resize feature. Strange because I have used VBoxManage as well as I could to create a CustomVideoMode1 with my resolution and also for setting GUI/MaxGuestResolution with the same parameters.

Have to see whether there is a thread on this problem...

Though you don't mention it, I assume you realize that the next step is to install the Guest Additions, because any previous graphics drivers you had installed will not work in a VM (the virtual hardware is nothing like the physical hardware you had). So if you want higher res and faster graphics, install the GAs.

@ mpack

Yes, I did install the Guest Additions (without this, I believe that VBoxManage would not be operative).
But the situation is as I describe it... not always !
Today, after a long period of work on VBox, all of a sudden the GUI changed to a finer resolution and the desktop of my guest system changed to the best resolution of 1920x1200...
I was very happy, although I did not understand the reason of this unprovoked change ; I thought it would last, but a moment ago I restarted my new desktop and rebooted the VM with the bad surprise of a reduced resolution again.
I definitely have to look at other threads to see whether this has been described before.

Greetings to you.