How do I get Win10 running in Oracle's VirtualBox?

[DougieLawson]

I tried to create a recovery DVD yesterday and completely failed to get a DVD burned that's bootable. So I don't really want to irreparably trash my Win8.1 system. There is a Lenovo recovery partition on my hard drive but that would push me back to Win7 and would trash all of my data. I could get a new 1TB drive but that's going to get trouble from the household finance director.

Is there any way to run a virtual copy of Win10 in Oracle's VM Virtualbox?

Without a copy of Win10 preview it's going to be a hard job to get a copy of the RPi Win10 IoT stuff running. Or is there an alternative way to do that?

[Douglas6]

Is there any way to run a virtual copy of Win10 in Oracle's VM Virtualbox?

I'm hoping there is. I downloaded an iso last night; I'll let you know how I get on.

[mikronauts]

I am also interested about how you make out.

Wiping a whole machine, or building another one, just to test Win10IoT on RPi is a bit much.

[DougieLawson]

Is there any way to run a virtual copy of Win10 in Oracle's VM Virtualbox?

I'm hoping there is. I downloaded an iso last night; I'll let you know how I get on.

Oracle Virtualbox just offered me a new version (I was updating my Ubuntu VM from Utopic to Vivid). That new version has options for Win10 when I created a new virtual machine.

I'm downloading the Win10 preview ISO now.

[fruitoftheloom]

I tried to create a recovery DVD yesterday and completely failed to get a DVD burned that's bootable. So I don't really want to irreparably trash my Win8.1 system. There is a Lenovo recovery partition on my hard drive but that would push me back to Win7 and would trash all of my data. I could get a new 1TB drive but that's going to get trouble from the household finance director.

Is there any way to run a virtual copy of Win10 in Oracle's VM Virtualbox?

Without a copy of Win10 preview it's going to be a hard job to get a copy of the RPi Win10 IoT stuff running. Or is there an alternative way to do that?

http://ms-iot.github.io/content/win10/SetupRPI.htm

""NOTE: you will need to follow these instructions on a physical Windows machine (and not a VM) because you need access to the SD card reader""

[Heater]

fruitoftheloom,

""NOTE: you will need to follow these instructions on a physical Windows machine (and not a VM) because you need access to the SD card reader""

Quite why MS can't provide an SD card image that can be written to an SD card with a simple dd command is beyond me. How hard can it be?

[DougieLawson]

""NOTE: you will need to follow these instructions on a physical Windows machine (and not a VM) because you need access to the SD card reader""

Oracle's Virtualbox allows you to dedicate real USB hardware as virtual USB devices on the hosted system.

[fruitoftheloom]

""NOTE: you will need to follow these instructions on a physical Windows machine (and not a VM) because you need access to the SD card reader""

Oracle's Virtualbox allows you to dedicate real USB hardware as virtual USB devices on the hosted system.

Seems MS needs some developers who have a wider scope than just Microsoft Products.....

[Douglas6]

Win10 is up under Oracle VB. I'm not sure I like the wallpaper. Footprints in the snow, leading off the edge of a cliff...

[GerritV]

fruitoftheloom,

""NOTE: you will need to follow these instructions on a physical Windows machine (and not a VM) because you need access to the SD card reader""

Quite why MS can't provide an SD card image that can be written to an SD card with a simple dd command is beyond me. How hard can it be?

by pranishk » Thu Apr 30, 2015 8:56 pm
Yes for this initial release you need a version of DISM that only works with Windows 10 Insider Preview, but we will be making the installation more flexible soon!

Pranish Kumar (pranishk@microsoft.com)
Microsoft Corporation

[at2oo1]

I´ve created a tutorial for this, included on how to flash Windows 10 IoT on SD-Card with Virtual Box (its in german )

http://raspberry.tips/raspberrypi-tutor ... tallieren/

[Douglas6]

Many thanks, at2oo1, that was a huge help. So, yes, it is possible to flash an SD card with Win10 IoT, using Win10 Preview in Virtual Box on a Win7 machine. Even I can do it. Now, I wonder what my chances are of getting WiFi working.

[Stanto]

""NOTE: you will need to follow these instructions on a physical Windows machine (and not a VM) because you need access to the SD card reader""

So I encountered this with VMWare Workstation, and upon looking up the reason to understand what was going on I stumbled upon the solution for VirtualBox. I know there's a link to the VirtualBox solution above, but I figured I would type it out and cover VMWare Workstation in this post.

Just to briefly explain, the reason why you can't access the SDCard by default, is that it's seen as a removable hard drive (though some computers connect it up to the USB port and so it is identifiable that way) so to get it working in VMWare Workstation you have to mount it as a hard drive. The same goes for Virtual Box.

The steps consist of finding the address to your SDCard reader and then creating a virtual disk .vmdk image and adding that as a drive to your virtual machine.

You can find the answers in a post on superuser.com which covers Mac and Windows 7, here are the windows 7 steps kinda quoted:

Get the DeviceID of your SD card reader.
You'll need a card in the drive, mounted by windows.
Enter this command:

wmic diskdrive list brief

It should look something like this:

C:\Users\Sandy Scott>wmic diskdrive list brief
Caption DeviceID Model Partitions Size
WDC WD7500BPKT-75PK4T0 \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE0 WDC WD7500BPKT-75PK4T0 3 750153761280
O2Micro SD SCSI Disk Device \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE1 O2Micro SD SCSI Disk Device 1 3964584960

The last device is the SD card reader, so the DeviceID is \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE1

Create the link file to the SD card
Open a command windows as Administrator

"C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage" internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename "%USERPROFILE%\Desktop\sdcard.vmdk" -rawdisk "\\.\PHYSICALDRIVE1"

Next we attach the raw disk to a guest VM within the VirtualBox UI

• Ensure the guest VM is not running.
• Ensure VirtualBox is not running
• Start VirtualBox by right-clicking on it and choosing "Run as administrator"
• Open the settings area for the guest VM
• Click on "Storage" in the toolbar
• Next to the controller click on the icon to "Add Hard Disk"
• Select "Choose existing disk"
• Navigate to the %USERPROFILE%\Desktop\sdcard.vmdk and select it
• You should now be returned to the Storage tab and see your file.vmdk in the list.
• Start the VM

Now, I wonder what my chances are of getting WiFi working.

It isn't supported yet, nor is bluetooth, apparently, in the Microsoft FAQ.

[Douglas6]

What, no Bluetooth? Grumble.