VirtualBox

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Installation

Reference instructions can be found here:

  • Add the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list (here for Ubuntu Karmic):
  • deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian karmic non-free
  • Add the Sun public key for apt-secure, then install
    wget -q http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/sun_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install virtualbox-3.1
    

The group vboxusers is created during installation.

  • Users of the VirtualBox must be member of that group. New users can be added with
sudo usermod -a -G vboxusers username
  • The daemon for the network interfaces will be assigned to that group.

VirtualBox requires a kernel module vboxdrv.

  • The default location of the module is given by setting KDIR=[fullpath] in file /etc/default/virtualbox.
  • The kernel module can be compiled with
sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

Creating a New Virtual Machine

  • To boot a Virtual Machine directly from a physical disk partitions, check the page on raw disks.

Booting Existing Windows XP from Physical Partition

Here I describe my attempt at booting the existing Windows XP partition on a Dell E6500.

  • In Windows, created a 2nd hardware profile called Virtual, copy of the original profile Profile 1
  • New VirtualBox machine:
    • Base Memory 1894MB
  • Using raw disk only with partition /dev/sda2 doesn't work
sudo VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename nxl670002-sda2.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/sda -partitions 2
This doesn't work! First Grub complained, then I tried to restore back the default WXP MBR (using either install-mbr or ms-sys but to no avail)

I created

  • Virtual machine NXL670002
    • Base Memory 1894 MB
  • Using raw disk with whole disk access/dev/sda
sudo VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename nxl670002-sda.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/sda
This works, Windows boots!
  • But hangs. In Safe Mode, it hangs after loading AGPCPQ.SYS.
  • Some related posts:
http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic21511.html
http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=19847
http://forum.driverpacks.net/viewtopic.php?id=3865
This post refers to problem with ACPI / APIC.

Miscellaneous work-around

  • Deleted the file ...\system32\drivers\agp440.sys and agp440.sys + agppcq.sys in dllcache (check [1], post from ChaosAddict, 20100210).
→ Now windows boot until login screen, but blue screen about IRQL_GREATER_R_EQUAL

External references:

Interesting post about step-by-step configuration to run an existing Windows XP installation.
  • Two posts about disabling IO APIC:[2] and [3]. But apparently this doesn't really fix anything (also the poster has a old cpu, etc).