I am running an HP Envy 15, 16GB and 500GB (7200 RPM) Hard drive.

Had a VM configured from another environment, created the virtual machine config file on Virtual Box, everything seemed ok.

Fired it up, and it was  s   l   o   w, it took close to 10 minutes for it to load, and about 5 more to see Windows was in the process of loading before the BSOD.  Thought, maybe, just maybe it will not happen again … oh was I wrong.

Frustration had already hit an all time high with this configuration and the number of issues I’ve had.

How I did the troubleshooting …

The best thing to do (IMO) is to step back, and gather your tools to debug this situation.

Tools:  Virtual Box command line tools, Windows Debug.

Virtual Box comes with a pretty good set of tools to examine, migrate and overall tasks to deal with VMs.

The firs step:  use VBoxManage to prevent the VM from rebooting after the error to get enough time to really dig into the BSOD issue.

Command used:  

VBoxManage setextradata VMNAME "VBoxInternal/PDM/HaltOnReset" 1

Once this was done, the error reported was an “Inaccessible boot device” coming from a “Stop – 7B” type of error on the BSOD.

The issue I had with this, my VM was configured to use a virtual SATA controller, and thought Windows 2008 R2 would handle this fine … again wrong!  Because the integration tools from the other product where wanting to take effect that was throwing everything off.

The fix

The fix was almost handed to me, edited the configuration for the VM, removed the SATA controller from it, added the virtual hard drive under an IDE controller, boot up and voilà … it works!

I was then able to install the Virtual Box guest tools and such, but have decided to favor “keep on working” over “let’s try SATA again”