virtualbox install

[Bruce Marshall]

On Sunday 18 January 2009, Keith Antoine wrote:
> I have installed VirtualBox latest iteration but saw something in the user
> manual that has me wondering. I have a totally SATA drive machine and the
> user manual said:
>
> The entire SATA controller and virtual disks attached to it (including
> those in IDE compatability mode) willonly be seen by operating systems that
> have the device support for ACHI>. In particular, there is no support for
> ACHI in windows before windows vista; Windows XP (even SP2) will not see
> such disks unless you install additional drivers. We therfore do not
> recommend installing operating systems on SATA disks st this time.
>
> My dual boot has Windows XP SP3 and loads onto my SATA drives without any
> additional drivers, they could be in PATA mode but I am not sure, without
> looking at the bios, and I would lose this if i did. So has anyone else
> loaded XP as a guest system on sata drives, no ide's in the machine.
>
> Sorry no sig block as yet.

Yes I have....   although to virtual disks....  and everything is fine.

I don't know why they mention that.  I have only run into ACHI  on a new 
Toshiba laptop I got about a year ago and linux recognized and would use the 
drives in ACHI mode but XP would not.    But it was a simple matter to go 
into the BIOS and switch the drives to 'legacy' mode  (not sure that was the 
term used but the effect is to make them SATA).

You didn't mention whether you wanted to connect the drives to VB directly, or 
to use virtual drives.   I would recommend the virtual drives.