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Some time ago I got a request of making a fairly old (Windows 7 64bit) machine into a virtual machine. I was given a hdd clone of the machine in question however when this drive is used in VirtualBox it does not boot. Stops right at the beginning with error stating there is no bootable media. I have tried every possible configuration of VirtualBox machine to no avail. I then tried to boot that drive from a physical machine and to my surprise it did the same thing. Need to mention that whenever I attached this disk as just a storage disk and not a primary boot disk it works - I can access all the files etc, just cannot boot from it. I was entirely sure there must be something wrong with the disk but then I attached it to a little older Lenovo M710s pc and... IT DID BOOT. I was also told it succesfully booted back at the company who sent it to me on the machine it was cloned from.

Since I was tasked with making it into a VM I installed Virtual Box on said Lenovo that disk managed to boot on, made a VHD of that running machine and... same story. VirtualBox stops saying there is no bootable media and no configuration changes anything.

I am somehow convinced this is a hardware issue since on some physical machines it boots and on some it does not.

Another disclaimer - I did try to fix boot from Windows 7 USB, tried chkdsk, tried bootrec.exe in cmd. Nothing changes anything, it just does not boot.

Looking for any possible reasons and resolutions as to how to make the VM work or just assurance that it won't.

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    What method did you use to make a VHD of the disk? I have a feeling the solution to your problem might be described here superuser.com/questions/1070984/…
    – Silbee
    Commented Mar 22 at 11:30
  • Did you try this: forums.virtualbox.org/…. You need to convert the disk to virtual, not just try to run it.
    – anon
    Commented Mar 22 at 12:04
  • @John I may not have specified it but I did of course make it into a VHD to be able to attach it to a VM, sorry for not being clear
    – radzik
    Commented Mar 22 at 13:13
  • If you properly converted the Windows 7 disk into a VHD, there may be an issue with the original Windows 7. You can try making a new Windows 7 machine and see if it runs satisfactorily . Windows 7 can no longer be updated.
    – anon
    Commented Mar 22 at 13:15
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    From WinPE/WinRE: BootRec /FixMBR && BootRec /FixBoot && BootRec /RebuildBCD then reboot once command completes (UEFI: remove && BootRec /FixBoot). If that doesn't resolve it and it's a non-EFI VM, ensure the boot partition is marked active in DiskPart
    – JW0914
    Commented Mar 22 at 14:25

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