Virtualization of a Partition

[saxofoner]

I'm trying to run my windows partition in VMWare or VirtualBox. I have followed multiple tutorials today, and I have gotten both VMWare and Vbox up to the point where it tries to boot Windows XP. However, rather than booting, windows says:
A disk read error occurred
Press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to restart
Now, pressing ctrl alt delete at this point does nothing, and I can't blame the software since they both do it.

This is a Thinkpad T61P, with a SATA hard drive. In the bios I can switch between AHCI and Compatibility modes. Neither works.

Does anybody have any ideas? I'm willing to try anything. Infact, I tried running "fixmbr" from the recovery console through the virtual machine off the xp install disk. That rendered my windows partition(s) useless until I did it again from the actual xp machine, rather than VBox.

So that was fail. Halp plz.

[GooblyWoobly]

Also on the same boat. Please help.

[bodhi.zazen]

This is IMO in Beta and can cause significant problems / data loss so be careful.

See the sticky at the top of this forum.

[ittayd]

Same problems here. The sticky didn't help. I tried creating the disk by using some partitions, by using whole disk, by setting it as scsi and ide. Nothing helps. I always get a "disk read error".

I have thinkpad t61 with sata disk and windows xp sp2

[saxofoner]

So uh... no progress on anybody's part?

[evets]

Try this How To on VB's site.

http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Migrate_Windows

Please post back your successes or failures. Thanks

[rrhoglund]

Hi everyone..I have have t61p running hardy and windows xp. I have also tried to get this to work and get the read disk error (with virtualbox and vmware). I also tried modifying my hal.dll by using the following tutorial.

http://www.vmware.com/support/gsx25/doc/disks_dual-boot_acpi_gsx.html

Same problem. Any ideas?

[Sand Lee]

Have you tried this tutorial yet? Boot an existing XP (Physical HD) install with VirtualBox (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=769883)
If it didn't work please let me know any errors you received.