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VirtualBox Issue


Glenn9999

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I have tried VirtualBox on several occasions, but the problem I have is that I see nothing but a line of garbage come up when I try to set up a virtual hard drive with any of my boot disks. Any suggestions on how to solve? Thanks.

Edited by Glenn9999
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By default (as you don't tell much about your achievements, I guess you're still there), VirtualBox will boot your physical CDRom. If no media is present or if it's not bootable, it will boot your virtual HDD (if you've created one). If not partitionned-formatted-bootable yet, it will stop or crash.

What do you mean by "any of my boot disks", are they physical boot cdroms ? Do you get a "press any key to boot from CD" message ?

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OK I figured this one out, finally. I ended up making a very vanilla boot disk (bare minimum of OS files & CD-ROM drivers) and it worked. Evidently, VirtualBox chokes on anything non-vanilla. I tried a good number of combinations of things (basically all my OS boot disks - if you can't load an OS onto the VM, you can't get much farther).

Got an old copy of Windows loading now, so it seems like things are under control. Thanks for the response.

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Evidently, VirtualBox chokes on anything non-vanilla.

:huh: if the cd or the iso is bootable, I can't see why it would choke.

Maybe your memory repartition is such that your host OS chokes and VirtualBox freezes.

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May I add my own problem here?

I am used to share some folders of the host computer for the guest from VirtualPC, but in VirtualBox it doesn't work. Well mainly I don't understand what the two possibilities mean, but they don't work anyway.

If I share say my D: drive, I get this: Shared folder path blabla is not absolute (and some stupid characters).

If I share some directory from the drive, nothing happens.

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Evidently, VirtualBox chokes on anything non-vanilla.

:huh: if the cd or the iso is bootable, I can't see why it would choke.

Maybe your memory repartition is such that your host OS chokes and VirtualBox freezes.

Well let's see if I remember the littany of problems:

1) One boot disk only came up with a line of garbage.

2) Another boot disk hung after loading JO.SYS.

3) Yet another standard (yes the one that it will make if you tell it to on install) Windows ME system disk hung on one of the Adaptec ASPI drivers.

All three work fine on the machine if booted straight from them and not from the VM and all three have no bad sectors or corrupt files.

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what version of virtualbox are you using? can you give us details of the guest configuration?

can you be more specific than a "line of garbage"? Screenshots?

what type of boot discs are these? DOS? WinPE? Other?

what is an "old copy of windows"? Win95? WinME? Win2000? WinXP?

JO.SYS or IO.SYS?

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what version of virtualbox are you using? can you give us details of the guest configuration?

2.10, though recently upgraded to 2.12.

can you be more specific than a "line of garbage"? Screenshots?

Can't be much more specific than what I spoke of. But here you go.

Case #1 was fixed with the upgrade to 2.12, though here are three more. Locked up.

http://bnfbua.bay.livefilestore.com/y1pVm7...EQ/VBOXSS02.JPG

http://bnfbua.bay.livefilestore.com/y1pIoz...yA/VBOXSS03.JPG

http://bnfbua.bay.livefilestore.com/y1pxLM...xQ/VBOXSS04.JPG

what type of boot discs are these? DOS? WinPE? Other?

DOS, as can be seen from the screenshots.

what is an "old copy of windows"? Win95? WinME? Win2000? WinXP?

Windows ME (again screenshots). Though it never got loaded except off the vanilla bootdisk. Slow as molasses on a 0F day, but that's a different problem.

JO.SYS or IO.SYS?

JO.SYS. See the first screenshot.

Edited by Glenn9999
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@walrus

did you run the guest editions? if so the folder you share will appear if you right click my network places select explore you will see the \\vboxsvr.

It will let you go through the share folder process in the vbox toolbar without running the additions, but it will not be accessible.

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@walrus

did you run the guest editions? if so the folder you share will appear if you right click my network places select explore you will see the \\vboxsvr.

It will let you go through the share folder process in the vbox toolbar without running the additions, but it will not be accessible.

Uhh, that's a bit complicated. **** software.

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not terribly, just go up to devices, the bottom selection is guest editions. If autorun is on the wizard will pop up and walk you through the install (if not just go to the cd drive and execute it) and reboot. Then I imagine the folder you believed you shared will be present under network places.

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  • 4 months later...

I use VB 2.2.4 on XP

I can concur with the following:

[...]

3) Yet another standard (yes the one that it will make if you tell it to on install) Windows ME system disk hung on one of the Adaptec ASPI drivers.

[...]

The Adaptec ASPI drivers that I used were from ghost 8.3 generated startup floppy.

Also: sometimes VB will only show the first line of the dos-commands, and will overwrite them continuously. This happens when I send the “crtl+ald+del” and the system reboots but doesn’t show the “bios bitmap”.

Not to mention a bug which locks the crtl-key and makes it impossible to unlock. To unlock it, I need to enter the virtual machine, “right-crtl” out of it. Then it suddenly locks up again while VB works on the background. Imagine typing and crtl suddenly locks up!! This issue I had once and I had to reboot the system to fix it.

My first virtual installation of XP also froze some 17 minutes prior to the estimated end. The second installation worked flawlessly. Cause? No idea.

Support of vhd-files is ridiculous. If you make two snapshots, and discard the last, the VB just crashes!! Why make vhd’s loadable if their support isn’t stable?!

Also, one time the virtual machine just wouldn’t load up. It happened when trying to start a second virtual machine, while the other was working on lower priority. The little msgbox saying that the virtual machine is starting stayed on 0% and didn’t go away. Virtualbox.exe process was taking 100% CPUtime. I couldn’t even kill the process; I had to reset my PC, something which I do once a year!

All these issues I had in ONE day. Imagine how far I got with what I planned to do…

I use Virtual PC already for some 2-3 years, and never had problems with it. Because of lack of USB support and VRDP, I thought to give VB a try. On various sites it is depicted as the best, or at least on of the best free open source virtualization alternatives. But most of the time I try to switch to some open source software I first get overthrown by the features and then disappointed by the buggieness.

Edited by Davor
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May I add my own problem here?

I am used to share some folders of the host computer for the guest from VirtualPC, but in VirtualBox it doesn't work. Well mainly I don't understand what the two possibilities mean, but they don't work anyway.

If I share say my D: drive, I get this: Shared folder path blabla is not absolute (and some stupid characters).

If I share some directory from the drive, nothing happens.

You have to put a backslash in front of the drive letter(in Folder Path, like D:\) to avoid that message and actually share your entire drive. I know...

Edited by Fox Mulder
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