Virtual Box 'VT-x is not available. (VERR_VMX_NO_VMX)' error

Most modern CPUs support VT-x. This allows VBox to run much faster.

You can use VBox+VMUB to boot directly from a USB drive within Windows.
Note that the USB drive will be seen as a SATA or IDE hard disk by the guest OS (not as a USB drive and not as a 'Removable' drive - so E2B Windows Installs from an ISO will not work correctly).

In order to enable VT-x, you need to have a VT-x capable CPU, then enable VT-x in the BIOS settings and make sure that no other software is 'grabbing' that resource (e.g. Hyper-V).

There is a good article on How-to Geek about this.

My VBox was working fine until I upgraded my system to Win10 Pro for £2.84 (see previous blog post)  and installed Hyper-V as a Windows 'Feature'. Then I got the dreaded Virtual Box 'VT-x is not available. (VERR_VMX_NO_VMX)' error message when trying to use VMUB.

It seems the only solution was to uninstall Hyper-V, so now it is all working again!

How to make a .VHD from a .imgPTN file (or how to copy all Windows files to a different drive)

Basically, I had a complete working Windows installation on a disk Volume and I just wanted to copy all files to another disk Volume...

Actually, I had created a new 16GB NTFS  .imgPTN file and installed WindowsToGo onto it.
The .imgPTN file booted to Windows nicely.

However, I wanted to convert the partition to a .VHD fixed-size (not dynamic) file so I could add it to my E2B drive and boot directly to it without having to 'switch' partitions - this would allow me to directly access all of the files on the E2B drive after I had booted from the VHD.

Since the WinToGo partition was located on a 500GB USB drive, I did not want to use a DisktoVHD conversion tool because I would end up with a 500GB .VHD file!

I could not find a way to simply copy the files from the USB drive to an empty VHD virtual drive. I kept running into permission issues, symbolic link issues, locked files and other access problems caused by Windows thinking the files were important OS files!

Even upgrading my Windows Home OS to Pro and using VSS didn't help.

After asking the good guys on reboot.pro, it was suggested I use Olof's strarc utility and it worked a treat!

Here is what I did:

How to upgrade to (or get) Win 10 Pro for £2.84p!

I wanted to copy a full Windows installation from a USB drive to a VHD, but I was being constantly frustrated by Windows 10 locking some of the files in the \Windows folder on the USB drive. This was preventing me from copying many of the Windows files on the USB drive to the VHD, even though I had booted to Windows 10 Home from my hard disk and Windows shouldn't even be locking the files on the USB drive!

Now there are several solutions to copying 'locked' files, but none of them were successful because I was running Windows 10 Home and I suspected that the problem might be connected the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) and Hyper-V not being supported in Windows Home. I could have resorted to booting to WinPE, mounting the VHD using Diskpart and then copying over the files, but this would be inconvenient if I had to do this many times in a day.

So, I decided to upgrade my Windows 10 Home to Windows 10 Pro and spend the £2.84p required (and hang the expense!).

Here is how I did it...

Add LibreElec 'Krypton' KODI to E2B

The new Kodi 'Krypton' version is available as a LibreElec Beta build here.

I used LibreELEC-Generic.x86_64-7.95.1.img.gz
You can follow the instructions in a previous blog to get it working with persistence on your E2B drive.

LibreElec Krypton booted from E2B on my IdeaPad 300

You may need to use a real system (not VBOX) and a USB 2.0 port to get it to work!

UEFI-booting a Windows Installer with a large (>4GB) Install.wim files using Easy2Boot

If you are trying to boot to a Windows Installer via UEFI, then you will need to use a FAT partition to hold the boot files because UEFI will only boot from a FAT partition (the EFI boot partition on a GPT disk is formatted as FAT).

The easiest thing to do, is to simply convert the whole ISO to a FAT32 partition image by dragging-and-dropping the ISO file onto the MPI_FAT32 Desktop shortcut to make a .imgPTN file.

The resultant .imgPTN file should then be UEFI-bootable and MBR-bootable (though for Win7 x64 UEFI booting, you need to tweak the files a bit - see here for details).

Large Install.wim or Install.esd files

The problem comes when you meet a Windows Installer ISO that contains a file that is over 4GB in size (for instance \Sources\Install.wim or \Sources\Install.esd). If you try to make a FAT32 .imgPTN file using MakePartImage, it will fail when it tries to copy the very large file to the FAT32 volume!

The best (most compatible) way to UEFI-boot is to have a USB drive containing a single FAT32 partition. However, the maximum file size for FAT32 is 4GB.

The solution is to split the Install.wim or Install.esd file into smaller files.

The new Split_WinISO.exe Windows utility will do this for you. Just feed it the ISO and it will make a .imgPTN file for you (or a new ISO with split WIM files).

E2B v1.89b/c Beta now available

I have added a few tweaks to the v0.0.3 Make_E2B.exe GUI:

• Button added to run MAKE_E2B_USB_DRIVE.cmd script - you can use this if you want FAT32 or configure the MyE2B.cfg file in a different way.
• MAKE_E2B_USB_DRIVE.cmd script now tests for >137GB drives and prompts you to select a partition size of 137GB for best compatibility
• Make_E2B.exe button automatically reduces partition size to 137GB if target drive is over 137GB (no user prompt)
• E2B version number now displayed in title bar
• Remove dependency on COMDLG32.OCX (OCX is not present in Win8/10 standard OS) 
• 'Extract E2B' button now creates a folder on your Desktop automatically (e.g. .\E2B_v1.89b)
• v1.89c - you do not need to connect a USB drive first.
• v.189c - German translation for E2B menu has minor changes (thanks to Frettt!).

Please try it and let me have your feedback.

The other E2B files have not been changed from v1.88.

Download from Alternate Download Areas as usual.

If you have tried it and it works, please tick the Interesting reactions box below.
if you found a problem, you can quickly send me feedback from here.

Easy2Boot v1.89a Beta now available with Make_E2B.exe Windows GUI utility

It seems that some strange people have a pathological aversion to the Windows command shell or maybe cannot read English text and type Y or a number on a keyboard (??) and so they do not like running the E2B .cmd script files to make a USB drive.

So I have written a small Windows GUI called Make_E2B.exe which will run the scripts for them!

Make_E2B.exe

MPI Tool Kit v0.072 is available

Apart from small changes to the MakePartImage script (only affects text messages) and the \menu.lst file (for Acronis 2016 and 2017 conversion to .imgPTN), the \grldr grub4dos file and \e2b\SWITCH_E2B.exe have been updated.
If you wish to update to this version, unpack the download onto your Desktop and double-click on the CreateDesktopShortcuts.cmd file to update the MPI Desktop shortcuts for v0.072. If you have modified the old CUSTOM folder, you will also need to copy this across to the v.0.072 folder too. You can then delete the old MPI folder.

E2B v1.88 now available

v1.88 is now released and can be found in the Alternate Download Areas as .zip files (you can update a DPMS or non-DPMS version of your E2B drive just by using the smaller non-DPMS version - just run the UPDATE_E2B_DRIVE.CMD file from the download).

I will add the self-extracting .exe files and .7z files in a few days, as well as update the E2B website with 1.88 version.

See previous blog for a list of changes. Please comment if you spot a problem.

E2B v1.88m Beta now available

I hope to release v1.88m as 1.88 Full Release version in a few days.
Please try it and let me know if you find any problems.

Changes from 1.87 are:

• Add Server 2012 R2 Std Eval Product Key file
• Update of Wincontig
• Update SDI executables
• Can now use .isofira or .isofira01 for Strelec WinPE ISOs
• MAKE_THIS_DRIVE_CONTIGUOUS.cmd now only works on the USB root (\) folder and all folders under \_ISO. Any user folders under the root (e.g. disk backups, applications, etc.) will not be made contiguous when the script is run.
• MAKE_E2B_USB_DRIVE.cmd can now be run from your E2B USB drive to make a new E2B drive.
• Later version of grub4dos 0.4.6a
• New jpeg-based default purple background for 2017
• Some changes to QRUN.g4b
• Spanish language updated and a few other language files improved
• Pi_pixel_x86_Persistent.mnu sample mnu file added for PIXEL iso, 
• Gandalf sample .mnu files added, 
• Boot_Recovery_WIM.mnu sample menu added (boot from any systems winre.wim)
• Fix for case where grub4dos 0.4.5c tries to load jpg as wallpaper (jpg not supported by 0.4.5c),

Download is available from the Alternate Download Areas.

Read more: http://www.easy2boot.com/download/e2b-version-history/