VirtualBox troubleshooting

[FloEdelmann]

I recently bought a new Dell XPS 15 9560 and followed your awesome guide to install Ubuntu 16.04 (or rather KDE Neon to be specific) alongside Windows.

The VirtualBox part did not work out to be just as easy as the other parts, so I share my experience with you, maybe you want to integrate it for others:

I did not install the virtualbox-ext-pack package as that conflicts with both virtualbox-5.1 and virtualbox-5.2 (which I ended up using) from the 3rd-party repository.

Otherwise, the setup worked as described by you. But the VM did only boot into an UEFI Shell instead of starting Windows. The way I fixed this (with help from here):

1. In the UEFI Shell, type fs0: [enter] and edit startup.nsh [enter].
2. Type \EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi, save with Ctrl+S and quit with Ctrl+Q.
3. Restart the VM. After a 5 second delay, this script is executed automatically to start Windows (evertime the VM boots up).

[hyviquel]

I was able to use the same process to boot windows on Ubuntu 18.04. However, the VM is not booting directly to the UEFi shell but in grub console. So I put 2 times 'exit' in the console then the VM is booting in the UEFi. Choose 'Boot sequence' then 'UEFi shell', you can then perform the commands described by @FloEdelmann

Unfortunately, the VM will always boot in grub and you'll have to run the UEFI shell by hand, but this seems safer to me than booting from the whole disk.