Migrating Windows 7 from VMWare Fusion to VirtualBox

Posted on August 1, 2011 by Carlos Sanchez

I recently had to start using Windows to connect to a client’s VPN network. Their VPN solution only works (or is supported) on Windows, plus the need to test a few things on Internet Explorer 😦

Previously I had used Amazon EC2 whenever I needed to use windows, to avoid license costs, 20GB of my drive wasted and the CPU/RAM overhead, but this time there was no way out, didn’t seem cool to store the VPN credentials on a public cloud instance, although it’s probably as safe. So I bought Windows 7 online and downloaded the 3GB iso image and VMWare Fusion for OS X which happens to have a 30-day trial. Got Win 7 working there with no problems, which is not what I can say about the VPN setup.

Then I got good recommendations to try VirtualBox, which is both open source and free as in beer, and was glad to see there are ways to easily move your VMWare images to VirtualBox.

Step by step instructions

To move the Windows 7 image to VirtualBox 4.1 just needed to

Uninstall the VMWare tools and shutdown windows
Copy the disk files from VMWare image to a new folder

In Documents/Virtual Machines right click on the image, Show package contents
Copy all *.vmdk files to a new folder

Create a new VirtualBox machine with the same characteristics

Make sure you choose Windows 7 64 bits if that’s what you used
On Virtual Hard Disk, choose the main vmdk file you copied in previous step (although you’ll need to change the default storage config later)
Customize created VM settings:

General: Windows 7 64 bits
System/Motherboard: set the same amount of base memory as the VMWare one
System/Motherboard: Enable IO APIC
Storage: By default VirtualBox adds it to SATA controller but you have to remove the SATA controller, and use IDE PIIX4 without host I/O cache, attaching vmdk to primary master IDE, leave CD/DVD drive

Boot the VirtualBox VM and follow any prompt to restart Windows to install new devices
On the VirtualBox Devices menu, click on install guest additions

Troubleshooting

Several things went wrong before I got it working, so just in case you have the same problems

Stuck in “Windows is loading files” black screen, rebooting continuously: make sure you have selected 64 bits Windows and enabled IO APIC
Blue screen of death: Remove SATA, SCSI and any other non-IDE controllers from Storage, attach vmdk to IDE and make sure PIIX4 is selected
Windows needs to be repaired / Cannot repair windows: same as previous one, make sure disk is attached to IDE

48 thoughts on “Migrating Windows 7 from VMWare Fusion to VirtualBox”

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Chad on September 5, 2011 at 07:10 said:

Thanks for your note on converting from Fusion to Virtualbox. I have been stuck with the BSOD and the solution was removing the SATA Controller and attaching the VMDK to the IDE Controller.

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Carlos Sanchez on September 20, 2011 at 09:14 said:

No problem, that’s why I posted it, glad it helped someone 🙂

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ejder on September 23, 2011 at 02:18 said:

Thanks a lot Carlos. Your help is appreciated :)…

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Josherna on October 12, 2011 at 07:24 said:

“remove the SATA controller, and use IDE PIIX4” You are my hero!!! health and long life to my Lord!! Thank you!!!!

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owjhart on November 10, 2011 at 17:58 said:

Yes!!! Exactly what I was looking for. I was stuck with the black boot screen “Windows is loading files”.

Fixed with using IDE Controller
-> uncheck host I/O
-> removing SATA
-> adding the VMDK as Disk to IDE Controller.

Brilliant.

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SM on November 20, 2011 at 21:33 said:

Worked great. Thanks a lot! Was getting stuck at BSOD and restarts before that…

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nahtanoj on November 22, 2011 at 12:53 said:

Hi. Thanks for the pointers – I too am lookgin to move from a vmware fusion image to virtualbox. One question so far – When I choose VMDK for the disk type it’s not asking me for a file, instead it seems to be creating a new disk image. Am i missing something? Thanks.

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- Carlos Sanchez on November 22, 2011 at 21:25 said:
  
  In the Create new virtual machine wizard, Virtual hard disk step, I have an option to Use existing hard disk
  
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  - nahtanoj on November 23, 2011 at 06:49 said:
    
    Excellent and thanks. I found that and do now have it attached. I’m running XP and now that I have that set up when I boot up my vbox it immediate says “error loading operating system” in the black box after the Vbox spalsh screen. I did notice that my version of vbox does not have the default SATA drive config so I guess i don’t need to remove that. I also noticed in fusion that it shows my disk as SCSI and it is broken up into 2gig pieces. Does that matter? Any other ideas?
  - Carlos Sanchez on November 24, 2011 at 21:33 said:
    
    Disk should not be SCSI
    
    use IDE PIIX4 without host I/O cache, attaching vmdk to primary master IDE, leave CD/DVD drive
Vincent Murphy (@vdm) on November 24, 2011 at 15:06 said:

I just did this for a VMware Fusion 3 Windows XP guest with a Virtualbox 4.1.6 on 10.7.2 host. I ticked IO APIC (didn’t test it without this), IDE was already selected. All its short is looking inside the .vmwarevm file. Thanks a lot for the HOWTO; it saved me upgrading to VMware Fusion 4 because of video refresh issues on Lion.

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wildert1 on December 8, 2011 at 19:38 said:

Awesome tip, your the only blog that mentions enabling IO APIC

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macrules on January 20, 2012 at 06:41 said:

awesome dude! that fixed my BSOD!
Thanks a lot!

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Jerome on January 26, 2012 at 17:48 said:

Thanks so much for this information. Helped immensely and saved me HOURS of doing a fresh install and re-installing all my apps.

I was running into an issue with VM Ware Fusion 3 when I would ‘command-tab’ off of my Windows 7 VM, the screen would go dark and would never come back forcing me to perform a ‘forced shut down’ on my mac. I didn’t want to pay to upgrade to Fusion 4, so after recommendations to try VirtualBox I am giving it a shot!

Thank you for sharing your knowledge with the web.

Thank you! Thank you!

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Jurgen on February 16, 2012 at 07:12 said:

Thanks man, that helps a lot

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Gus on February 19, 2012 at 10:11 said:

Many thanks, I run into the same problem and spend more than an hour trying to figure out what was going wrong until I saw your post!

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emirpprime on March 8, 2012 at 02:42 said:

Been having problems with this for days until I found this! Works perfectly now – thanks a lot!

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Alex Takacs on March 24, 2012 at 12:18 said:

yet another happy camper – had the same (BSOD) issue and your blog entry was exactly was I needed 🙂

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Russ (@its_russ) on April 18, 2012 at 08:24 said:

Thanks so much! I almost had this working except for the setting the HD storage medium to IDE. Your post definitely saved me some headaches.

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Z. on April 29, 2012 at 07:38 said:

Thanks! Got mine working.

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mario on May 30, 2012 at 14:33 said:

thank you 🙂

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Eduardo on July 26, 2012 at 14:41 said:

Thanks a lot for the information! This information allowed me to migrate a Windows XP VM from vmware 3 (not supported on Mountain Lion) over to virtual box.

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Sanjo on August 6, 2012 at 15:55 said:

Thanks for your bluescreen troubleshooting tip. Removing the harddisk from SATA and attach it as IDE worked for me. 🙂

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Danny Corder on August 7, 2012 at 15:25 said:

Ditto to Eduardo, the way VMware have left Mountain Lion users sucks. Thank you so much for your help here – saved me a lot of trouble!

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Peter on August 10, 2012 at 20:54 said:

Thanks, your tip did the trick for me – migrating a Windows 7 VM from VMware Fusion under Snow Leopard to VirtualBox under Mountain Lion.

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Ulrik Gammelby on September 3, 2012 at 10:08 said:

Thanks a lot! The hints in this post worked wonders for some similar trouble I had with Parallels: Choosing PIIX4 and replacing SATA with an IDE controller fixed a BSOD when migrating from Parallels 6 to VirtualBox 4.1.20.

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Brian Pipa (@brianpipa) on September 4, 2012 at 13:24 said:

Another happy customer – removing SATA and making it IDE fixed my BSOD too – thanks!

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Alvin on October 7, 2012 at 18:05 said:

This is great! Thank you for the step by step. I had been working on this for a week now! Something so simple but dumbfounding if you are a nub!

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- buziaczek on June 28, 2013 at 09:23 said:
  
  and I was angry by spending one day on this issue… ufff so you say it wasn’t that bad. Thank’s!
  
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Juddernaut on November 30, 2012 at 10:46 said:

Thanks from me too. Read a few other articles on pulling in Server 2008 VMDKs but they never pointed out this crucial step.

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David Volz on December 13, 2012 at 13:05 said:

Awesome instruction set! I was moving a VM from VMware Workstation to VitualBox and the same steps applied. Huge help! Thanks!

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JAG on January 5, 2013 at 15:10 said:

Worked perfectly to convert a Windows 7 vm from Fusion 3 which had been disabled with OS X ML upgrade. Thanks so much!

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Tom on February 15, 2013 at 05:34 said:

Ah, thanks for the tip! It’s curious that Windows 7 is fine with the VirtualBox SATA adapter when you install from the Win7 ISO but it causes a blue screen when you use it on an existing VMWare image. Does anyone have any good ideas about how to re-introduce the SATA controller?

I’m very pleased to be able to ditch VMWare – Server is unusable on any modern configuration and Player is annoyingly limited.

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kristarella on April 19, 2013 at 23:54 said:

Great post. Thanks for the tips.
Do you remember if you got your files and applications back when you did this? I tried this once and it seemed to work, but I didn’t see any of my personal files on there. Since then I made a royal mess and I’m restore the backup of my original VMware disk image from Time Machine before I try again. So I just thought I’d check if this method brings over apps and files too, or just the operating system.

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T.Terlemez on April 25, 2013 at 04:42 said:

Many thanks. This was very helpfull.

Good days and works.

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carboncowhawn on June 17, 2013 at 12:23 said:

Worked fine on moving a Windows Server 2008 R2 from VMware Fusion on a Mac Server to VirtualBox on a Microsoft Box! IDE setting is the real key to success here!

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buziaczek on June 28, 2013 at 09:21 said:

You made my day! Well done, thank’s a lot!!!

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http://www.norse.ulver.com/ on July 4, 2013 at 15:51 said:

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Roman Mironov on July 20, 2013 at 01:54 said:

Thank you very much. Your post helped me resolve the BSOD quickly.

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Mateusz on March 11, 2014 at 20:10 said:

Thank you so much! I really appreciate your article.

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Benedikt on March 21, 2014 at 14:40 said:

I read a lot of migration tutorials and allways failed. (boot loop, bluescreens) Deleting the SCSI controller and attaching the VMDK file to the IDE controller did the job.
Thank you for pointing it out! Helped me a lot to be able to use my Win7 image created with VMWare convert in a Linux installation.
Now I can install Linux natively on my machine! YAY! One step closer to a Windows-free machine. Just needed my old Win7 installation for backup in case I might want to look up something of forgot to migrate data/setting from my old Win7.

Thank you!

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-Mike on November 19, 2014 at 18:01 said:

Fantastic, worked perfectly the first time. I am now free of the annual VMware tax when upgrading OS X. Thank you!!!

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