I have been going through forums and following “how to’s” and walkthroughs on how to use VirtualBox to run my Win 7 VM. I have a pre-created VHD that I am importing to my OpenSuse 11.4 machine. One vhd was created in Hyper-V and has hardware and cpu cross compatibility turned on. Everything works perfect when booting it up on my Hyper-V server. When I move it over to my OpenSuse VirtualBox the VM will not boot. It gets to the “Starting Windows” screen and then throws an error screen that the VM encountered errors while booting. It then runs the Window’s startup recovery tool and even tried to do a system restore. Nothing works and it never progresses beyond that point. Figuring there was something with the vhd file. I used Acronis Advanced Backup and Recovery to create a non hardware dependent backup that was automatically converted to a vhd. I know the process works as that is how I have converted the bulk of the servers at work into VM’s. However, when I move the vhd file to the OpenSuse VirtualBox… it does the same thing.
So I am trying to figure out what might be going on here. Is VirtualBox not able to virtualize Win 7? If not then what VM software should I use? VMWare, Xen, ???
Yes, it can. You might be missing something in the vm configuration.
Don’t know anything about Hyper-V server and if the vm images are the same and can be exported. The format I know for virtualbox is .vid (Sun xVM VirtualBox Disk Image).
On Wed, 10 Aug 2011 14:06:02 +0000, sothardw wrote:
> So I am trying to figure out what might be going on here. Is VirtualBox
> not able to virtualize Win 7? If not then what VM software should I
> use? VMWare, Xen, ???
I don’t know about VirtualBox, but I have been running Win7 in VMware
Workstation 7 (64-bit all around) here for a few days (out of necessity
for a contract I’m working on) and it seems to work there just fine.
Hyper-V makes VHD files which are a selectable option in VirtualBox.
[QUOTE=]I don’t know about VirtualBox, but I have been running Win7 in VMware
Workstation 7 (64-bit all around) here for a few days (out of necessity
for a contract I’m working on) and it seems to work there just fine.
Jim[/QUOTE]
Thanks Jim, that was my plan for today (try VMware) if I didn’t hear anything that might lead me to why my Win7 machine isn’t running. I can get XP to run in VirtualBox but not 7… bummer!
Win7 runs fine in VB. The problem is you have a disc image created with Hyper-V. My understanding is that .vhd drives are interchangeable between VB, VM, Xen, Citrix, and MS VPC prior to Win7. The Win7 and Hyper-V .vhd drives are incompatible with the others and each other. Somewhere I think that I read that there is a VMware tool that can be run on a Hyper-V host to convert the .vhd files to the portable versions.
I’ve successfully run Windows 7 via Virtualbox before, but not by vhd file. I believe the latest VB (4.1) has resolved some issues with vhd files. I could be wrong, but it may be worth your time.
OK… I got it working. I had to install the VB binaries to take it to 4.3 (to enable Win 7 and Server 2008 R2 support). Not sure if it was necessary, but I used vSphere Conversion tool to convert the running virtual machine into a VDMK file. I tossed that into VB and away it went! Working very well at that. 2 cores and 4 GB of RAM with 64MB of video memory. So this should work out for me just fine now! Thanks again for all the help!