Yesterday afternoon and this morning, I spent more time than I care to admit trying to install Windows 7 into a VirtualBox VM at work. On the first attempt, using a MSDN installer disk that a coworker lent me, I got an error which I initially attributed to a bad DVDROM: "The file or directory [...] is corrupt and unreadable"
However, after downloading an ISO image from MSDN, I saw the same error with it. I even found that by moving the popup error window, I could find another error window below it with the error code 0x80070570. So, more googling. Which turned up a lot of results regarding odd SATA drivers.
Finally I searched the VirtualBox site directly and found this post showing the same error I'd seen. In it, there is a link to another post which has a solution.
Apparently, my mistake was upgrading to the Oracle-branded VirtualBox v3.2 before attempting my install. It seems the SATA controller it provides to the windows installer isn't so great. If you remove it from your system configuration, and instead attach your virtual hard drive to the IDE controller, your installation will go much more smoothly. By which I mean, actually work.
