Migrated to 22.04 and VM guest no longer boots

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Fri, 2023-12-29 at 13:55 -0500, Jerry Geis wrote:
> Any thoughts ?

Hi,

consider to migrate your Windows 7 to virt-manager and post a detailed
howto ;).

On Arch Linux I'm using QEMU/KVM for Debian EDU 11 and VBOX for an
inactive XP, an active Windows 10 and 11 install and indeed my Windows 7
install should be active, too, but is broken for the second time.

It's not an Ubuntu issue. VBox became nearly unusable for many users on
many distros. It's not as usual a temporary issue. It's long lasting and
becoming more worse.

To run Windows 10 and 11 I build my own VBox 6+ packages and fix issues
with 6+ by myself [1]. I spend no time into trying to solve the Windows
7 issue and have give up using VBox 7+. After restoring Windows 7 from a
backup (it's to large for a snapshot), it failed again. I don't have my
notes at hand, but IIRC it was after installing the guest additions on
one of the VBox 6+ versions. I can't comment on VBox 7+ since this is a
PITA for several reasons on my machines.

However, "Version 6.1 will remain supported until December 2023" [2], so
soon or later not only Windows 7 will fail on my machine, but 10 and 11
will fail, too.

I don't know, if I will migrate Windows 7, 10 and 11 to QEMU/KVM, I
might install Windows 11 on bare metal.

Regards,
Ralf

[1]
Arch Linux official version:
• rocketmouse at archlinux ~ 
$ pacman -Si virtualbox | grep Ver
Version         : 7.0.12-1

My current package:
• rocketmouse at archlinux ~ 
$ pacman -Q virtualbox
virtualbox 1:6.1.48-7012.1

[2]
https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads