Windows 7 on VirtualBox

By Fat Bloke on Jan 12, 2009

Microsoft made Windows 7 beta available last Friday (Jan 9th, 2009) so decided to quickly take a look using VirtualBox on my Mac. This blog is about how I made it work.
If you know VirtualBox then the only non-standard step concerns the Guest Additions (Step 4 below)
(Editors Note: Since the release of version 2.1.2 Windows 7 works out of the box. )

1. Download the dvd iso from the Microsoft Windows 7 site

N.B. The Microsoft Download Manager uses ActiveX and so only worked in Internet Explorer. So I downloaded it from an XP instance running in VirtualBox to a Shared Folder on my Mac.

2. Create a New Virtual Machine in VirtualBox.

Although Microsoft recommend 1G for RAM, I used 512MB and it works great. Here are the rest of my settings:

3. Install Windows 7

Choose Custom Installation as we're doing a clean install into a virgin vm.

Voila!

4. Install Guest Additions

To install the Guest Additions we need to select "Devices...Install Guest Additions" to mount the additions iso. There is a check in the setup program, for version 2.1.0 and earlier, that prevents installation on Windows 7, so we need to run the installer in Vista compatibility mode. Do this by opening an explorer window showing the guest additions CD...

...and right click the 32 or 64-bit installer and select Properties. Now set the Compatibility Mode to Vista, and run it to install as usual.

5. Reboot

Now finally you need to reboot and you're done.

Windows 7 on your Mac (or Windows/Linux/Solaris PC too),