No bootable medium found! But there's a SATA drive

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WolfyRed
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Joined: 8. Apr 2023, 22:06

No bootable medium found! But there's a SATA drive

Post by WolfyRed »

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No bootable medium found!
Please insert a bootable medium and reboot.
It says this as I turn on my VM. You may think I'm trying to boot into a faulty ISO, or there's no SATA drive installed, but it is neither. There is no other media in this machine besides the SATA drive, which is clearly there because it says the size on it (10.00 GB)
scottgus1
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Re: No bootable medium found! But there's a SATA drive

Post by scottgus1 »

The message means the VM cannot find a bootable operating system anywhere in its drives.

Please tell us how you got this VM and we'll point out what might be done.

(Note that the presence of a drive on the SATA controller does not mean there's a bootable OS in the drive.)
WolfyRed
Posts: 14
Joined: 8. Apr 2023, 22:06

Re: No bootable medium found! But there's a SATA drive

Post by WolfyRed »

I literally do not know what happened. It was just fine when I used it the last time I booted it up, I was just doing normal computer stuff on it, and then I haven't booted it in a while, and now it doesn't want to recognize the SATA drive. It just seems to happen when I don't boot any VM for a long time, no matter the OS of the VM (Windows XP, Linux, Ubuntu), it will happen. This software is wack.
mpack
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Re: No bootable medium found! But there's a SATA drive

Post by mpack »

The usual way to make this happen is to be running a Linux Live CD for a long time, suspending the VM, and never actually installing the OS. Then one day you experiment with installing the GAs, which (a) won't work on live CD, and (b) causes the live CD to be ejected from the drive. Then you reboot or restart the OS.

If so then this never happens with XP, which doesn't have a live CD mode.

I can't think of another way to get this behaviour without an intermediate error message, i.e. VDI file not found.
scottgus1
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Re: No bootable medium found! But there's a SATA drive

Post by scottgus1 »

I'll just add that time does not cause degradation of the VM. I have VMs I haven't started in years that I just fired up last week, no problems. Far from this software being "whack" as you put it, I find it very stable, providing I'm not using bleeding-edge new versions on production hosts. (7.0 is new and still in bug-hunt phase just now.)

It is far more likely that something you don't know you're doing or a problem on your host is causing your trouble. If you come to us as soon as you have a problem, rather than waiting until tons of problems and frustration have built up, that we can help you maintain working VMs.
fth0
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Re: No bootable medium found! But there's a SATA drive

Post by fth0 »

Another way to get into this situation is booting the VM from an ISO file and using the guest OS (from the ISO file) to remove the bootable partition on the virtual hard disk. And there is more ...

Please reproduce the issue and provide a (zipped) VBox.log file from that VM run.
WolfyRed
Posts: 14
Joined: 8. Apr 2023, 22:06

Re: No bootable medium found! But there's a SATA drive

Post by WolfyRed »

Oh. The entire ".VDI" is just megabytes big, I guess I really just didn't install the OS into the SATA Drive...

But this doesn't mean that what I said can happen isn't true though, cuz each time I make a VM I will almost always install the OS with the ".ISO". And now I can check the size of the ".VDI" to confirm it was installed.
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