I'm trying to boot an XP installation cloned into VirtualBox from a real drive. I'm getting the message

A disk read error occurred
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart

whenever* I try to boot the machine.

* This is not strictly true: with AMD-V enabled, the boot process appears to not make it this far and instead hangs at a black screen with cursor.

I created the VirtualBox image from the original drive using the following method:

$ sudo ddrescue -n /dev/sdd sdd.img logfile  # completed without errors
$ VBoxManage convertfromraw sdd.img disk.vdi

The original disk (and the image) contain a single NTFS partition with XP installed on it. The owner of the drive indicates that it did boot okay the last time the system made it that far. The (Pentium 4) system has a broken (enormous) heat sink, so at some point it failed to boot because it would quickly overheat and shut down.

If I boot the VM from a live cd, I am able to mount its /dev/sda1 without any problems. I ran ntfsfix and didn't have any luck.

I've read through the instructions on doing this. I didn't really follow them. For example, I didn't run MergeIDE before imaging because the machine was not bootable. However, the symptom of that problem seems to be quite different.

The emitted message is contained in the volume boot record of the XP partition, which leads me to suspect that this is a problem with the core operating system bootstrap procedure, and not related to anything in the registry.

I don't have an XP boot CD.