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I have the latest Virtualbox 5.2.18 in a Ubuntu 18.04.1. I have a guest system Windows 10. I have a vmdk hard drive ( virtual drive) saved in a SSD disk ( the file .vmdk. So i have recently upgraded my system buying a NVME (Samsung SSD 970 EVO PCI-E NVMe M.2 500 GB). So i wanted to take advantatge and define the storage as:

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But i get an error when i want to boot:

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So but if i use the same file .vmdk as SATA ( which ive been using these past years and stored in a ssd disk) it works perfect...

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I have also in both guest and host the latest Extension pack installed. Do i have to convert the file .vmdk ? Any additional files or missed things ?

This happens with others vm with a .vmdk virtual drive and .vdi also.

Thanks in advance

2 Answers 2

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The same problem here. The VDI can be booted from using SATA Controller. It doesn't work when I switched to NVME Controller. Only showing the BLK storage not the FS.


However, using SATA Controller doesn't affect the SSD performance.

I'm using Intel SSD DC P3700 1.6T with Intel newest driver. The SSD can reach 2.4GB/s (2.8GB/s given by Intel) read rate using gnome-disks as benchmark. (100 samples with 500MB sample size)

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Related bug report: https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/17228

A drive gets detected when setting both extradata option on a 2 core VM, but booting from the controller or installing a new copy of Windows failed in my tests.


There are a few problems with your question which make it not a good fit here. There are a few issues with how you assess the your problem.

  • To get expertise advice on why your non-Ubuntu OS does not boot after changing the storage configuration of your VM you should be looking in a place where the respective OS is on topic.
  • Configuring storage for VMs or VirtualBox VMs in particular beyond the suggested templates provided by the wizard leaves the tedious task of reading documentation and testing to you. Here is what I found out:

    • The virtual machine has to boot as an EFI guest. There are no NVME drivers for BIOS systems, at least not in VirtualBox for now and probably will never be. It's as if you are unplugging the hard drive, which results in the same error message.
    • I tested most of my VMs switching them from SATA to NVME. Some were previously even configured with IDE. Ubuntu going back to Trusty had no problems. All were configured as EFI guests. [✓]
    • Fedora 29 did not survive the change, waiting in an endless dracut loop.
    • Installing Windows 10 as EFI guest on VirtualBox with NVME fails to detect the attached storage device. Tested with Windows 10 x64 1803, 1809 (fails to find device) and Insider 18290 (stuck with message "Press any key to boot from CD or DVD...") on Virtualbox 5.20 and 6.0.
    • An existing Windows 10 Insider VM fails to detect the additional controller properly when booting from SATA.

      Windows device manager: This device cannot start. (Code 10) An invalid parameter was passed to a service or function.

      My up to date Insider VM is giving me the green screen of death with a QR code and the error code indicating typical boot failures in this stage failing to find the device where Windows is installed. I cannot find (diskpart) or repair the boot setup after failing to boot two times and launching into WinRE.

      enter image description here

  • Since performance is important to you you should note that there are options to setup passthrough devices e.g. using your actual storage devices instead of going through the host OS file system driver and so forth. You can also setup iSCSI.

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    The virtual machine has to boot as an EFI guest. <= This is the key information I needed. Switching on System -> Motherboard -> Enable EFI (special OSes only) in the VirtualBox virtual machine settings fixed it for me, and with that the virtual machine boots now from an NVMe controller. Mar 29, 2021 at 9:25
  • Good hint, but just leads to an EFI shell in my case.
    – bomben
    Jun 20, 2023 at 12:58

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