Windows 7 guest initial boot very slow.

[socratis]

So there's something about the P2V conversion is bottlenecking (for lack of a better word) the ability of Virtualbox to read the VDI?

No, no, no. And in case you missed what all the previous users have told you multiple times; no.

There is something in your specific VM that does that? Most probably. There is something in VirtualBox that does that? NO.

Don't get sidetracked with VDI, caches, temp files and anything like that. Check what's running on your P2V system. The answer is somewhere in there. Unfortunately, we do not have your VM, so this is something that you have to research yourself I'm afraid.

[Zorba]

what technology is the G drive?

hitachi deskstar 7k3000 2tb.

Other VDI's on the same disk, in the same partition, run just fine.

I have 2 VM's that are set exactly the same (VM and in windows) only difference is one is a P2V and the other is not.

I have booted both VM's in safe mode - the P2V VM takes 3 times longer to load. The only difference in the VDI's, is the P2V VDI is a fixed size while the other
is dynamic.

Don't get sidetracked with VDI

I can't help it, if all things being equal, except for the creation of the VDI from the Clonezilla SSD disk image, then why the difference in VDI disk performance?

Researching this with you lovely people is exactly what I'm doing.

[Zorba]

if you're getting really awful disk performance using VirtualBox then I'd look to the disk before I'd look to VirtualBox

Have been doing that now with HDtune, did some random I/O tests on the VDI within the good and bad windows 7 and the bad one blue screens every time when it hit's the 1MB test. So now I've been scanning the disk in the host PC and it's, I'm afraid to say "Abandon ship!!!" it does indeed look like I have a very sick HDD, and it just so happens that the P2V VDI resides on a bad part of the disk.

I checked this disk not that long ago and it seemed fine, but now it's looking like it's failing massively, I'm now in the process of trying to save the data.

So lesson learned, check hardware thoroughly!

Thanks for your input guys!

[socratis]

Thanks for your input guys!

Thank you for letting us know. It's another thing to check when users might complain about bad performance.

[Zorba]

Thank you for letting us know

No problem, you're welcome! I would always follow up with a conclusion.

I gleaned a bit about VDI performance issues which I wasn't aware of - specifically - Improve VDI performance with IO Length Trending

http://myvirtualcloud.net/?p=988

But that wasn't the case here, It did make me wonder about disk formatting too, my disk is made up of 512k per sector so formatting as such
might make a difference in performance.Seems like formatting and ntfs is a whole other can of worms..

I was also thinking about the I/O cache thing and how it was helping with performance, what if instead of using the disk cache you could write
to a RAM disk that could be reloaded on reboot, updated and saved on shut down.

Anyway, Viva Virtualbox!

Cheers!

[mpack]

If the drive is mechanical then its usually possible to detect a damaged disk by ear - you can hear it retrying: which is of course where all the time is being lost.