Comments on: How To: Switch a VirtualBox Windows Guest Hard Drive from IDE to SATA Mode

By: r3dux

r3dux — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 22:13:31 +0000

Cheers for the tip! =D

By: Ryan

Ryan — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:41:40 +0000

FYI – don’t try to move your CD/DVD device to the SATA controller. It might sound like a good idea, but at least for me, XP would stop booting at a plain black screen (no BSOD even) until I moved it back.

By: marcinekwu

marcinekwu — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 18:01:29 +0000

Works!
Host: LinuxMint_64bit i5-2500 Guest: 10yr old XP 200GB.vhd Virtualbox 4.0.4
Thank You!

By: JD245

JD245 — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 23:04:49 +0000

I experienced the same issue as well. Once I added the SATA controller, the error disappeared. I assume it didn’t want to install the drivers because there was no corresponding hardware present. I could be wrong but that solution worked for me.

By: Marius

Marius — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 22:39:45 +0000

Thank you very much!

I ran into a problem after migrating Win7 from KVM to VirtualBox. I converted the win7.qcow2 image to VirtualBox win7.vdi. Then I created a machine for it in VirtualBox. Got a BSOD. I had mistakenly used a SATA controller and KVM only emulates IDE. Then I moved the image over to the IDE controller (ICH6), BSOD again. I had to use the PII4 IDE controller to get it to boot. Following the tips on this page I sucessfully moved the image over to the SATA controller again. Nice.

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 05:55:12 +0000

Thanks so much for the article! I took suggestions from the above comments and have it all working just great now. This is what I did for reference:
1. Power down the VM.
2. Add empty SATA controller.
3. Boot the virtual OS.
4. When XP asks you to install new hardware, ignore it and run the Intel SATA drivers.
5. Delete your IDE hard disk entry in Device Manager and shutdown your VM again.
6. In the VM settings, delete your IDE controller, and add a hard disk to the SATA controller.
7. Boot your VM and all is well.

By: r3dux

r3dux — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 06:00:41 +0000

Use whichever VM you want to add a SATA interface and SATA virtual hard drive to.

So if you have a VM called TestXP which has a virtual hard drive called TestXPDrive, and you want to switch it from using a virtual IDE hard disk to a virtual SATA hard disk, you do the following:
- Shut down the TestXP VM,
- Add a SATA interface from the VirtualBox VM Storage Settings screen (but do NOT add a hard disk yet – just add the SATA interface),
- Boot the TestXP VM,
- Install the Intel Matrix Storage drive
- Shut down the TestXP VM
- Remove your TestXPDrive virtual hard drive from the virtual IDE interface and add it to the virtual SATA interface you just added to the VM,
- Boot ‘er up – you’re good to go!

Hope this helps.

By: Todd

Todd — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 17:59:33 +0000

I am following your comments on the article about switching the virtual box windows guest from IDE to SATA. I, too, was getting the error msg about the hardware not supported by the driver. I followed your instructions and added the SATA to the storage configuration in VB. My question concerns the next step (I am a newbie to VM’s, sorry ) Do I use an existing VM or create a new one?

Thanks
Todd

By: greensea

greensea — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 13:20:54 +0000

Thank you so much. I spent one day long to do this. God, you save my life

Thank you a lot, r3dux and Spode… Have a nice day

By: r3dux

r3dux — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 11:56:15 +0000

You’re welcome – glad to be of use! =D

Also, I agree – there’s a definite speed boost to using a virtual SATA drive over a virtual PATA/IDE one, and if you can move the virtual machine’s hard drive to a non-booting drive (so the physical disk doesn’t have to do both system and virtual things) then things seem to get even snappier again…