After reading various tips on how to increase performance with VirtualBox, I am attempting to switch from an IDE disk to SATA disk (in my particular case VirtualBox w/ an IDE disk is an order of magnitude slower than VMWare when compiling a small application with Visual Studio).

I had hoped that Windows 7 would handle this without issues, but instead it boots into the 'Startup Repair' screen and is unable to "solve" the problem. Changing the SATA port does not help - ports 0 to 4 boot into the repair screen, and anything above that fails hard.

Looking tips on converting without major OS surgery on the guest...

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Edit - Clarifications suggested by *hotei*

Both the guest and host OS are Windows 7 x64, using a virtual disk. The host has 8GB of RAM, with 4GB allocated to the guest, and a i7-620 CPU (4 cores @ 2.67ghz). I have been using the 3.2 series of VirtualBox, currently working with 3.2.8.

In any case, I'm more curious about why Windows 7 is failing to switch from an IDE to SATA device than performance (switching to VMWare or VirtualPC alleviates the perf. issue).