Have you ever had a Virtual Hard disk file (VHD) from VMware and wanted to load it inside a Oracle Virtual Box environment. Well it is actually very easy to open VMware inside Virtual Box and you don’t have to convert the .vhd to .vdi.

When you add a vhd to Virtual Box, all goes well but windows throws a Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD) error. The reason for this is Virtual Box loads the newly imported vhd file as a SATA hard drive. This is wrong and needs to be added as a normal IDE drive.

Step 1:

Open Virtual box and create a new Virtual Machine by clicking on the New button.

Step 2-3-4:

Enter a name for your Virtual Machine and choose the correct Type of OS and Version that the VHD file contains.  Click next and choose the amount of RAM you want to allocate to the VM.  Click next again and select the VHD file you want to open in Virtual Box.

When you run the virtual machine you will notice that you get the BSOD error just before windows starts.

Step 5:

Select the Virtual machine and then click on Settings.  We will be changing the type of drive it allocated to the Virtual machine.

Step 6:

Go to storage and then select the SATA drive containing your Virtual drive and click remove attachment.

Step 7:

Add a new IDE controller by click on the little icon with the big green plus sign.  Choose an existing disk and select your vhd file from the explorer menu.

Step 8:

Save all your settings and re-run the virtual machine.  You will notice that you can now load the machine as normal.

Hope you enjoyed this quick tutorial on how to open VMware (vhd) virtual machine images inside Virtual Box.