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I have a dualboot system, Ubuntu and WinXP. I wanted to run my existing XP installation as a virtual machine under Ubuntu, so I installed Virtualbox, and followed the instructions on this page: http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Migrate_Windows

Everything went well (except a few glitches which I handled), XP started just like expected in Virtualbox and I saw the welcome screen, however I couldn't log in because neither mouse not keyboard were recognized. I couldn't install guest additions because...well, I couldn't login.

So, I rebooted the machine on XP, I installed guest additions (not on Virtualbox copy of the XP installation, but on the actual XP installation), rebooted on Ubuntu again, removed the XP virtual machine and repeated everything to create a new virtual machine from the existing XP installation on disk. But that didn't help either; mouse and keyboard are still not recognized.

Keyboard actually works until I see XP welcome screen on virtualbox. For example, when I boot the virtual machine from XP cd, I can use the keyboard. Only after XP boots, keyboard (and mouse) does not work. I also did a clean installation of XP as another virtual machine and it had no such problems.

So, the question is... how can make the keyboard and mouse work? Is there any way to install the drivers on Recovery Console? Or, can I install the required drivers by booting the virtual machine using a live linux cd and accessing the windows disk?

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Interestingly, it is working now. I guess while I was writing this question, it somehow decided to recognize the drivers. I'm not deleting the question, maybe it can help someone. – blahbaa May 9 '11 at 15:42
The pre-boot environment relies on BIOS for keyboard support, so it will always work. When Windows loads, then it takes over from the BIOS and handles I/O directly, and I suspect that what you've observed was that XP needed a lot of extra time to figure out which drivers to use -- sometimes this process can be quite lengthy, which can be frustrating because mouse and keyboard defects are assumed (and then unplugging these devices results in Windows abandoning the detection process only to start all over again from scratch after the device is plugged in again). – Randolf Richardson May 9 '11 at 17:09
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I used Ghost to convert my XP to a VMDK and it will not run unless I tell Ghost to include the mini setup to reset all my drivers when I boot the VMDK under VirtualBox 4.1.2 running on Vista Business 64 Bit.

Everything is fine until I get to the screen to type in my username and then the the mouse and keyboard go away.

I went into the machine settings and went to System → Motherboard and turned on "Enable absolute pointing device" and that fixed the mouse issue.

Now the mouse still works (direct IO required) but the keyboard will not capture. I even plugged in a second USB keyboard and the OS added the driver and VirtualBox added the driver. If I go to the menu and tell it to capture this USB device it still does not do it.

The BIOS should not be bypassed for any keyboard input. A direct driver is not needed, it's in the BIOS. That's the whole purpose, to be a generic layer between the os, and the hardware.

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Once the USB stack is loaded, BIOS disables the PS/2 K/M emulation. – kinokijuf Jan 29 at 19:12
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