XP installation - fatal error - could not read from boot medium

[mellow]

Hi, I have an old XP installation in virtualbox. It hasn't been used in a while; when I tried today I got FATAL: Could not read from the boot medium! System halted.

I also have a Win7 virtualbox installation and to be honest I can't remember if I've fired up XP after I installed Win7. The Win7 installation boots up fine. I'd really like to get into the XP installation to retrieve some files that would be difficult to recreate.

Here are some of the things I've tried:

- booting off the latest snapshot, taken when XP was working.
- changing the boot order to CD-first, then booting from a bootable (I checked) XP installation CD.

I thought the XP installation CD would do the trick - do I need to make an ISO and store it on the HD instead?

If all else fails, can I make a new XP virtual machine and use my old snapshot in it?

My host system is Puppy Linux's tahrpup 6.0.5 and I am using virtualbox version 4.3.4 r91027 on a Thinkpad T420. My latest log file is attached, from when i was trying to boot off the CD. The CD was mounted; on my system it's sr0 if that makes a difference.

THANK YOU VERY MUCH for any help! Please let me know if I can supply any additional information.

VBox.log

(51.04 KiB) Downloaded 8 times

[mpack]

Snapshots are not backups, they are only alternate states for the current VM. So no, they are not usable in anything except the current VM, and they can't even be used in the current VM if the latter is broken in any way. If you want to recover from host disasters you need a backup, not additional complexity and no backup.

Anyway your error doesn't seem to be a VirtualBox problem (otherwise it would be the VirtualBox manager that reports the problem, not the guest boot code). I'd say that the guest is not finding its boot drive for some reason. Did you perhaps change a disk controller or make a mistake with a partition manager?

[mellow]

Thanks for your reply. Since my objective was just to recover some files, I decided to not spend any more time trying to figure out how to make my XP installation boot. I was able to open the vdi file with 7zip and extract what I needed. Did that, then deleted the XP virtual machine. Before I deleted, I made a copy of the vdi file and it's lurking around on my backup drive in case I need it again.

And thanks for the heads-up about backups! Lesson learned - as usual, the hard way