Win-Lite Forum

I've been trying to get networking to work correctly in Portable Virtualbox 3.2.0 starter v4.2.1. On a machine that does not currently have Virtualbox 3.2.0 installed, the networking doesn't work. While I can choose the NAT option, nothing else will work within the settings dialogs of Virtualbox. Within the guest operating system, I do get an IP address, but nothing will go through to the network outside the host machine, not even pings.

I tried installing Virtualbox 3.2.0 on the host machine, which for some reason makes the networking function correctly when I then bring up Portable Virtualbox. If I uninstall Virtualbox from the host machine, then the networking no longer works in Portable Virtualbox. Please note I have Portable Virtualbox on a USB hard drive and is a completely separate install from the one that was installed into the host machine.

I found out there was an option in the Portable Virtualbox tray settings dialog about networking, and that it was defaulted to the networking being disabled. However, changing that doesn't change anything.

The easiest way to see if it is working is to try and set the virtual machine's network card to bridged mode in the virtual machine's settings. When it's not working it shows "Not Selected" in the Name field and doesn't list any network adapters. When it works, it automatically picks up one of the physical network adapters in the host machine and lists all that exist in the host.

So has anyone else seen this issue yet? Or found a way to fix it so I don't have to install Virtualbox on the host machine? I've done this on two different computers, with different versions of Windows installed (one has Win XP Pro 32-bit, the other Windows 7 64-bit), and it does exactly the same thing on both (networking works fine if Virtualbox is installed on the host, and doesn't when it's not).

I just realized how long it's been since I posted this, figured I would see if anyone else has an answer. Now I see there is a new version of Portable Virtualbox for VBox version 3.2.4. Downloading it and setting it up now to see if it works any differently...

Not much change for Portable Virtualbox for VBox 3.2.4. NAT networking at least works now. The other options still don't work.

Bridged networking still does the same, doesn't give me any adapters to choose in the settings dialog to bridge it to.

I haven't tried it yet, but I suspect that installing VBox 3.2.4 on the machine will make the networking function fully, which still defeats the purpose of having a PORTABLE version.