As you know I’m a big fan of Virtual Box being able to run my x64 VMs on my Win7 machine. Yay!!

So armed with my trusted new Core i7/8 GB laptop – I figured the VMs will be cooking on this new kit…

After installing the lastest VirtualBox (3.2.0) I was away – only to notice the machines were running like a SLUG! (I actually have a cat that has the nick name ‘slug’ and this machine was slower than her)

After waiting a full 20mins (still booting - ‘loading windows files…’ etc) my machine Blue Screened for a millisecond and then rebooted.

So I rolled up my sleeves and started digging – could be the VHD, the bios, the machine, the 1000 and 1 settings…

Firstly I ran a command line command (from under the vbox install dir) -
VBoxManage setextradata VMNAME "VBoxInternal/PDM/HaltOnReset" 1

Finally I got a glimpse of the BSOD and it was an error “…STOP…7B…”

I twigged this is an error of “Inaccessible boot device….” which I’ve had several times when the SATA drivers couldn’t be loaded by the O/S during boot up.

Solution: (in my case)
I configured the Virtual Box VM with IDE Storage Controllers and NOT SATA ones for the bootup.(still connected to the same VHDs though)

Win2008/R2 boots up and I’m able to load the SATA drivers in and we’re away.

Back to BizTalk 2010 Beta playing…. :)