virtualbox.org

Win 7 Host Not Booting After Guest OS Installation in Host Boot Drive

Dell Vostro 2520 64 bit Laptop show below error on power on.

Internal hard disk drive not found
To resolve this issue, try reseat the drive
No bootable devices -- strike F1 to retry boot, F2 enter setup menu, F5 enter PSA

Ran the F5 dell internal diagnostic tool that show rest all peripherals working correctly except no hard drive status.

The only thing did last with the laptop was to install Virtual Box and install Windows 7 32 bit os in the guest machine set in host bootable C drive. The next day prompts hard disk not found error. Tried to repair any possible corrupt os to boot from usb drive but on reboot show similar error as not drive found to boot.

Had similar issue few years ago with Win xp but could not recollect how fixed the issue that time.

How did you installed the os in vm? Virtualbox does not provide a gui option to use a physical disk. What all happened is (assuming you are telling the truth) you mounted your physical hdd & installed vm or such & corrupted its boot partition. Probably you did it in superuser or admin mode.

What ever can you do is to repair the disk partition, booting from another media or mounting your drive to another machine.

If you have windows, probably the best method will be using a recovery/install media(cd/usb) & boot & use F8, select repair my computer. You need to reinstall the os, so backup the drive with another machine(you may get error reading files, use recovery tools).

Again Never play with a real machine af if it were a vm

**say your host, & mods pls move it to appropiate host forum, not guest.

Maybe you just had bad luck and the harddisk died just after you installed your guest system.
There is nothing in VirtualBox which could do something like this to your harddisk.