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I have Windows 10 (installed on my SSD) and Linux Mint (installed on a partition of my HDD) setup for dual boot. Now I'm trying to set up VirtualBox such that I can virtualize the Mint from my Windows. For this I tried to follow the explanation given here: Use physical harddisk in Virtual Box and created the .vmdk like this:

 VBoxManage.exe internalcommands createrawvmdk 
     -filename "path\to\physical\disk\file.vmdk" 
     -rawdisk \\.\PhysicalDrive1 -partitions 2r,3

where PhysicalDrive1 is my HDD, the partition 3 is the partition assigned to my Linux and partition 2 is the EFI partition on the HDD.

However, when I try to run the VM I then get the error:

FATAL: Could not read from the boot medium! System halted.

Here a screenshot of my disk partitions:

enter image description here

1 Answer 1

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It sounds like you forgot to actually enable EFI boot mode in your VM's settings. The quoted error message only exists in VirtualBox's PC BIOS firmware – the EFI firmware would instead drop you into the "EFI Shell" interface if it wasn't able to boot.

Screenshot of VirtualBox VM "motherboard" settings, with freehand circle

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  • With enabling this, it indeed drops me into the EFI shell. I checked and noticed that the EFI partition on my HDD contains no boot info whatsoever, only a folder called 'System Volume Information'. So everything is handled in the EFI partition of my first drive, where I start grub to be able to select which OS to boot. I'm kind of at a loss of how to handle this now.
    – leyren
    Commented Mar 17, 2020 at 21:45
  • What I did now was copy the content of EFI/ubuntu from my C: drive to the D: drive as well. It still boots into the EFI shell, but like this I can then start grub manually. However, booting into ubuntu like this gets me stuck on the loading screen of the OS.
    – leyren
    Commented Mar 18, 2020 at 13:21
  • Using the original EFI instead yields the same results.
    – leyren
    Commented Mar 18, 2020 at 13:33

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