Comments on: How To Install Windows 7 on a Virtual Machine with VirtualBox

By: Jorge Sierra

Jorge Sierra — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 21:36:00 +0000

Hmm… I’m not at all familiar w/ how Win7 treats Windows shares, but it sounds as though you may have some kind of permissions issue. Does your Win7 user have permission to read/write to the share?

You could always make the share public and read/write for all. That should solve the problem, although is an insecure solution. If all of your machines are behind a secure firewall, you should be relatively safe.

By: Paradigm

Paradigm — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 21:29:41 +0000

Jorge,

Thanks so much for the information. I got everything working pretty well but I’m having trouble installing applications on my shared drives.

I have an application drive that I share with both Windows7 and Ubuntu, I want to also use it for installing applications on my virtual Win7 machine. From my Win7 VM I can see the drive and access files and even execute files from them. However when I try to browse to the shared drive to install applications it shows up with an x on it and says that it not connected. Also when I execute a program from the shared drive, the program can not access any of it’s required data on the same drive, and I get errors saying that it can access the drive. Is there a problem fully connecting these drives, or is it just a limitation of Windows 7 preventing me from installing onto shared drives?

By: Jorge Sierra

Jorge Sierra — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:30:39 +0000

I also had trouble getting the folder sharing to work. I just set up regular folder sharing via Windows to get around it.

By: shahid

shahid — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:28:22 +0000

i have successfully installed windows 7 as guest OS on my windows XP system . however i am not able to access folders of my host OS within the guest OS. i have tried sharing folders but now i dont know how can i see them
any help?

By: ssmokin

ssmokin — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 12:34:45 +0000

Thanks Jorge, yea I took the plunge and used EASEUS partition
manager to create a 10gig NTFS partition, it was dead easy and Win7 installed straight up.
Best ssmokin

By: Jorge Sierra

Jorge Sierra — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 11:29:16 +0000

Yes, the file size limit applies to a standard hard drive as well. That’s the reason you’re getting that error when you reach the 4GB mark. The virtual hard drive resides within a single file on the host system, so if you install VirtualBox on a FAT32 disk (USB, hard drive, or otherwise) you will encounter this limitation.

Really the only workaround would be to convert your FAT32 disk to NTFS.

By: ssmokin

ssmokin — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 04:05:25 +0000

Sorry, didn’t finish note.

Has anyone else experienced this and if so is there a work-around?
Thanks

By: ssmokin

ssmokin — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 04:02:38 +0000

I am running latest Version of VirtualBox in WinXP(Fat32) on my laptop and attempting to
install Win7. I notice that you say that to run on USB it needs to be NTFS.
Is this the same for a standard hard drive?
There is no mention of this in the forum except for USB use.
My VB is setup 1024Mb Ram (I have 2gb installed) and 10Gb Drive space(Dynamic sizing).

I continually get the error “Hard disk full” and this is when the installation is at 4GB file size(85% installed).
I have deleted files off C and D drives to free up space, altered the ram setting down to give more to the host

By: Jorge Sierra

Jorge Sierra — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 19:35:15 +0000

Did you set up the VM to connect through the local network and install the guest additions?

By: richard

richard — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 16:00:58 +0000

Jorge,

Hope you can help me. I’ve installed WIN7 RC in VirtualBox but have been unable to get the network to connect.