I had booted using an DVD. I open VBox and build a VM that boots from the CDs iso. Within the booted cd iso (within VBox) I select HD Install. It seems that within this install the VM is using the DVD that booted the pc rather than the CD which is booting the VM. Does that help make sense? (the operation aborts shortky after the files start to copy to the virtual disk) I feel this is because the VM is using/looking at the physical DVD/CD drive rather than the VMs CD iso in which it booted with.