Thursday, November 5, 2009

Using HyperV VHD in Sun Virtual Box - no bootable medium found

Since last week I started migrating all my HyperV VM's into Sun's Virtual Box.

All my VMs migrated without a problem (after I learned I have to completely remove the HyperV before the virtual box would start...) except for one.

Trying to start it gave me an error: "fatal no bootable medium found system halted virtualbox" and I could not even use the VHD to format and reinstall it!

This one was a virtual windows 2008, 64bit with MOSS 2010 installed.
It was my only win2008 and my only 64bit VM - so I assumed this was the problem...

But, as it so happen, this was also the only VM I created in HyperV! All others were migrated from VPC or Virtual Server editions.

So, after a lot of research, formatting, copying, pasting I found the solution.

It appears that HyperV created VMs are not the same as VPC ones, and Sun VirtualBox does not recognize the HyperV VHDs correctly.

The quick and easy fix (which I didn't believe would work but did!) was to install VPC and use the VPC VHD wizard utility to compact the HyperV VHD.

Don't ask me why, but it did the trick and now my VHD is bootable in Sun VirtualBox!

Since I did not found any post on that matter anywhere I thought this might be handy for some of you.

Cheers

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

This worked for me as well. Thanks for posting!!!

Simon said...

Hi, really good. This works for me to on a xp Machine. Thank you for this post. But what can you do if you have only Windows 7 x64? You cannot install VPC2007 and the new Virtual PC has no wizard to compact the vhd. (Discpart.exe did'nt work!) Any Idea

Anonymous said...

Works. Brilliant!

Varun Sharma said...

Hi There..

Really helpful post..

I have WIn 7 (64bit) and installed Virtual box .

I am looking for VHD to tag with virtual box to have visual studio 2008 and sharepoint 2010 configured to be use as development environment.

From where I can get the virtual box VHDS of sharepoint 2010

Thanks
Varun

Shai Petel said...

Hi Varum!

Well, you get get a demo machine from microsoft's web site and convert its Hyper-V to San Virtual box machine, this one for example

or it is recommended that you build your own virtual machine, assuming you have the MSDN/Developer licenses.