WinXP guest does not boot after upgrade to 1.6.0

[christoph.lukas]

I have been running VirtualBox 1.5.6 on an Ubuntu Gutsy host. I have installed a WinXP guest some month ago.

After upgrading VirtualBox from 1.5.6-28266 to 1.6.0-30421 this WinXP guest does not boot any more. It stops just after the Bios screen with 'Media error'. I did not touch the configuration of this guest.

This might be caused by a different hard disk layout presented by the bios:

VirtualBox 1.5.6:
00:00:03.958 PIIX3 ATA: LUN#0: disk, CHS=21845/16/63, total number of sectors 22020096
00:00:08.550 Guest Log: BIOS: ata0-0: PCHS=16383/16/63 translation=lba LCHS=1024/255/63
00:00:08.626 Guest Log: BIOS: Booting from Hard Disk...
00:00:08.871 Guest Log: BIOS: int13_harddisk: function 15, unmapped device for ELDL=81

VirtualBox 1.6.0:
00:00:03.259 PIIX3 ATA: LUN#0: disk, PCHS=16383/16/63, total number of sectors 22020096
00:00:03.738 Guest Log: BIOS: ata0-0: PCHS=16383/16/63 LCHS=1024/16/63
00:00:06.223 Guest Log: BIOS: Booting from Hard Disk...
00:00:06.224 Guest Log: BIOS: int13_harddisk: function 02, parameters out of range 0001/0031/0008!

Booting the guest system from a knoppix cd both VirtualBox versions show a disk geometry of CHS=21845/16/63 according to fdisk -l. In both VirtualBox versions I can access /dev/hda1 as a valid windows partition.

Please let me know if I can supply any further information.

Thanks in advance, Christoph

[christoph.lukas]

I have worked around this issue:

• installed VirtualBox 1.6
• created a new disk with same size
• attached the new disk to the VM
• booted the VM using Knoppix
• cloned the disk content:

sfdisk -d /dev/hda | sfdisk /dev/hdb dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb count=1 bs=512 dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hdb1

• removed the old disk and made the new primary master

the drawback is that you loose all your snapshots. Probably it would be worth trying VBoxManage clonevdi instead.

[christoph.lukas]

The commands should look like:

sfdisk -d /dev/hda | sfdisk /dev/hdb
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb count=1 bs=512
dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hdb1

[Frank Mehnert]

Please reopen if still relevant with the newest version.