Frank, hi. While I have enormous appreciation of Oracle VirtualBox, having no doubt that most reasonable persons share this opinion as well, it is not yet perfect. Yet, perfection of software is also not an expectation of reasonable persons but only a mark of excellence toward which to strive earnestly.
> -----Original Message----- > From: Frank Mehnert [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Tuesday, October 16, 2012 3:56 AM > To: Community mailing list of VirtualBox users > Subject: Re: [VBox-users] change from IDE Controller to SATA > > John, > > On Tuesday 16 October 2012 08:44:47 John A. Wallace wrote: > > One more question arises in regard to this, does Virtual Box provide > > drivers for the SATA Controllers/Disks for Windows XP to use for > > attaching one of these devies? I had thought that they would be in > the > > guest additions, but apparently not. The lack of native support for > > these devices by Windows XP explains how I ended up with the IDE > > attachment, but I do still want to move it to SATA. Thanks. > > VirtualBox does not provide Windows drivers to support SATA. There is > no reason to do so. If the guest supports SATA then it will surely > provide drivers for this hardware itself. The drivers to enable support for these devices on systems that do not support them natively normally come from the hardware vendors along with the devices themselves. Since VirtualBox is in the business of providing a platform for the virtualization of hardware, which is to present (i.e., an emulation of) a hardware-like environment to the guest OS, it would seem like a natural extension of this idea to include the hardware drivers. After all, one would not expect hardware vendors themselves to be inclined to provide VirtualBox with the very drivers needed to bypass their products. > VirtualBox does full > virtualization, that is, the guest runs on virtual hardware and the VMM > does not really care which guest it runs. The VirtualBox Guest > Additions help certain guests to improve the communication with the VMM > and the host by taking some shortcuts. This technique is also known as > 'paravirtualization'. Be that as it may, if VirtualBox can provide the means to integrate my pointing devices and other components so as to "improve the communication" between these pieces of hardware and the guest OS, it would seem to me that it could just as easily improve the communication between the SATA controller, which is in fact enabled by the VM itself, and the guest OS supporting it. > > And regarding your original question: Yes, it would be possible to just > create a disk, attach it to the virtual SATA controller and copy the > data from the IDE disk to the SATA controller. But that means that you > need SATA drivers for Windows XP from somewhere and that means also > that you need to convince Windows somehow to boot from the SATA disk > afterwards, which will be very difficult as Windows is stubborn when it > comes to changing the disk controller of the system hard disk. Indeed, I could not agree with you more. Windows can be stubborn and cause for much difficulty at times. Thank you for your continuing and excellent support of this endeavor. John ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_sfd2d_oct _______________________________________________ VBox-users-community mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/vbox-users-community _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe: mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe
