[Solved] Installing guests on Hipster 2017.10

Discussions related to using VirtualBox on Solaris hosts.
rhb
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Joined: 21. Dec 2017, 02:16

[Solved] Installing guests on Hipster 2017.10

Post by rhb »

I am having a lot of trouble trying to setup VirtualBox on Hipster 2017.10. System is a 3 disk mirrored rpool (s0 slices) and a 3 disk RAIDZ1 vpool (s1 slices) on identical 2 TB disks with SMI labels. Hipster is fine, though I experienced some strange hiccups setting it up related to the installer assumptions. Part way through creating the 3 way mirror it borked itself and I had to start over. The second time it went as expected. I've used a similar configuration on another system with 4 disks using RAIDZ2.

I have installed VBox 5.2.4 with the 5.2.4 extension pack. I've added myself to the vboxuser group.

I created a VM for Debian 9.3. But when I attempt to install Debian, I get a "Fatal error: no bootable medium...". Following a lot of web searches I've tried turning off the network, the audio and USB, though the latter seems to turn itself back on. I've putzed with the CD settings to no avail. If I select "passthrough" I get a failure trying to mount the DVD R/W. The disk is fine and the system will boot from it if I reboot with it in the drive.

I also created a VM for Windows 7. That will load the repair disk, but then it cannot find either an NTFS USB drive with a system image on it, or the last DVD from a system image set.

The thing that is making me really crazy is that I've done *all* of this except the Win 7 install either under Hipster or under Win 7. I'd concede just to get on with life, but I really want ZFS on Solaris as the host.
Last edited by socratis on 24. Dec 2017, 11:55, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Marked as [Solved].
rhb
Posts: 13
Joined: 21. Dec 2017, 02:16

Re: Installing guests on Hipster 2017.10

Post by rhb »

If I copy the DVD to disk and then select the disk image instead of using the DVD drive it works fine. Go figure. Of course it *did* work from DVD once.

BTW this is on a Z400 which I forgot to mention
rhb
Posts: 13
Joined: 21. Dec 2017, 02:16

Re: Installing guests on Hipster 2017.10

Post by rhb »

WTF? After successfully installing Debian I'm getting more erratic behavior trying to load Windows 7 Pro.

I was able to boot from an image of the repair disk, but it still refuses to see the images of the DVD set. It produces a failure message when I try to eject the virtual disk. One time after I had dropped into the recovery menu and selected "restore from system image" it saw the image of the last DVD but then when I tried to switch to the real DVD drive to read the first DVD it borked itself.

Now it doesn't even see the image of the repair DVD. It produces at "BOOTMGR is missing" message and suggests using CRTL+ALT+DEL to restart. This is even when I shutdown the VM and restart it. Or shut down VBox and restart it!

I've attached a screenshot of the details of the VM instance
Attachments
details.png
details.png (72.47 KiB) Viewed 79900 times
rhb
Posts: 13
Joined: 21. Dec 2017, 02:16

Re: Installing guests on Hipster 2017.10

Post by rhb »

It gets stranger still. I managed to read the text hidden by the VBox stuff at the top of the VM screen and hit a key *before* it put up the BOOTMGR message. That resulted in the repair disk booting correctly. Previously the repair disk boot correctly without my doing anything either with the image or a physical disk. I then fed the virtual image of the last disk, ejected it and put the first DVD into the physical drive. It now seems to work. Of course, with 7 DVDs to read it will take a while and has many opportunities to fail.
rhb
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Joined: 21. Dec 2017, 02:16

Re: Installing guests on Hipster 2017.10

Post by rhb »

After a ridiculous amount of nonsense Windows 7 Pro finally installed from a system image. I shall test using a fresh install of Hipster, but for now here is what worked.

Boot from either a DVD or repair disk image. If you see text behind the translucent dialog box at the top, hit return quickly. If you get the BOOTMGR message, start over. Use a disk image of the last DVD in the system image set to allow the recovery program to find the system image. Once it finds that you can switch and it will read DVDs in the optical drive. I was never able to get it to recognize a system image on a hard drive despite many attempts. Nor was I able to get it to recognize the last DVD in the optical drive as require to start the process. No problem reading the last disk after it read the ones before.

To anyone at Oracle that works on VBox: Please *don't* cover the top of the console window with your dialog boxes. Put them at the bottom so people can read the messages from the guest OS installer. And test this stuff before you ship it. I don't really care how the install process is done so long as it is *correctly* documented.
socratis
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Re: Installing guests on Hipster 2017.10

Post by socratis »

rhb wrote: Use a disk image of the last DVD in the system image set
rhb wrote:with 7 DVDs to read
I'm not quite sure what you're doing with 7 (seven) DVDs! Even the latest Windows 10 fits in a single DVD, so I'm not sure what you have in your hands.
rhb wrote:with 7 DVDs to read it will take a while and has many opportunities to fail.
You might want to create ISOs from the DVDs to avoid both the speed issue and the potential read errors. I'm not familiar with OpenIndiana, so I can't offer more specific advice, but you should be able to figure it from the documentation or a quick search.
rhb wrote:Please *don't* cover the top of the console window with your dialog boxes. Put them at the bottom so people can read the messages from the guest OS installer.
There is a "Don't show this dialog again", but I see what you're saying. Even better, you just gave me an idea would be to have an additional "page" in the VirtualBox preferences with all the available warnings and a way to disable them individually or all together...
rhb wrote:And test this stuff before you ship it. I don't really care how the install process is done so long as it is *correctly* documented.
Oh, but they do test it, believe me. And the thousands upon thousands of users that have installed Windows in a VM is a testimony of that fact...

But it's good to hear that you got it going. Marking as [Solved]. Keep in mind for future reference that a ZIPPED VBox.log from a failed VM run is one of the requirements of the Minimum information needed for assistance.
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mpack
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Re: Installing guests on Hipster 2017.10

Post by mpack »

socratis wrote:
rhb wrote:And test this stuff before you ship it.
Oh, but they do test it, believe me.
Not least by releasing a free version so that guinea pigs like us can find these problems before actual paying customers do.
rhb
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Joined: 21. Dec 2017, 02:16

Re: [Solved] Installing guests on Hipster 2017.10

Post by rhb »

I had 7 DVDs because I was migrating a bare metal instance to a VM. The only way I know of to do that is by recovering a system image in the VM. As it would not recognize the presence of an USB hard drive system image, I made the DVD set. I have only recently condescended to using Windows at all. My general attitude is exemplified by the Dilbert cartoon on the front of "Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment".

It would be *nice* if you actually told the user where the log file was! I bought a Z400 to replace my Ultra 20 because it was the cheapest Solaris qualified workstation I could find. My primary work system runs Solaris 10 u8 and likely will until I die as it is the best scientific development system ever. It runs twm for the windowing system and is absolutely reliable. Unfortunately, I have work for which that is not a suitable platform.

I should like to point out that whoever tagged this thread [solved] was both premature and did not contribute anything to the solution. I shall be performing a bare metal install of Hipster followed by VBox and a minimal instance of Windows at which time I shall furnish the logs if they exist in the host filesystem. While VBox doesn't want to tell me where the logs are kept, find(1) will do what I ask.

The error message in the logs was a common hit when I searched for answers. So a lot of people have encountered the same problem. How many abandoned VBox as a result is unknown. I tried VBox on Solaris 10 5-6 years ago and abandoned it after a few hours as not usable.
rhb
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Joined: 21. Dec 2017, 02:16

Re: [Solved] Installing guests on Hipster 2017.10

Post by rhb »

socratis wrote:
rhb wrote:
rhb wrote:And test this stuff before you ship it. I don't really care how the install process is done so long as it is *correctly* documented.
Oh, but they do test it, believe me. And the thousands upon thousands of users that have installed Windows in a VM is a testimony of that fact...
I very much doubt that thousands and thousand of users have installed Windows in a VM on *any* Solaris instance. Yes, it works on Windows hosts, but I want to have ZFS as the host OS which makes Hipster the host of choice. It certainly has *not* been adequately tested if it takes someone like me 20+ hours to make it work.

I spent my career fixing this sort of stuff for my clients. In one instance I had been asked to fix a problem with a vendor package for which the client paid $80,000/yr for support. When the vendor support guy said, "If you get it working please send me the fixes so I can give them to the other customers." they had to peel me off the ceiling with a putty knife. That is the only thing I can recall that I did not fix.
mpack
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Re: [Solved] Installing guests on Hipster 2017.10

Post by mpack »

rhb wrote:It certainly has *not* been adequately tested if it takes someone like me 20+ hours to make it work.
You seem to miss the point entirely. You are not an Oracle customer, you are a tester.
rhb
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Joined: 21. Dec 2017, 02:16

Re: [Solved] Installing guests on Hipster 2017.10

Post by rhb »

I'm trying to install the Guest Additions. That seems pretty basic. What I get are messages about being unable to mount in unmount operations and vice versa. I should also like to note that selecting an image from elsewhere in the filesystem also fails. The log file is attached.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Unable to insert the virtual optical disk /opt/VirtualBox/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso into the machine Debian-9.3.

Could not mount the media/drive '/opt/VirtualBox/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso' (VERR_PDM_MEDIA_LOCKED).

Result Code: NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005)
Component: ConsoleWrap
Interface: IConsole {872da645-4a9b-1727-bee2-5585105b9eed}
Callee: IMachine {85cd948e-a71f-4289-281e-0ca7ad48cd89}
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

root@Hipster:/opt# find /opt -name '*iso' -ls
230569 56613 -rw-r--r-- 1 root bin 57868288 Dec 18 10:11 /opt/VirtualBox/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso
230594 1 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 25 Dec 20 08:28 /opt/VirtualBox/amd64/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso -> ../VBoxGuestAdditions.iso
root@Hipster:/opt#
Attachments
Debian-9.3-2017-12-24-10-38-35.log.gz
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socratis
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Re: [Solved] Installing guests on Hipster 2017.10

Post by socratis »

[color=#FF0000]rhb[/color] wrote:Windows 7 Pro finally installed from a system image.
[color=#00A000]socratis[/color] wrote:But it's good to hear that you got it going. Marking as [Solved].
[color=#FF0000]rhb[/color] wrote:whoever tagged this thread [solved] was both premature and did not contribute anything to the solution.
No comment.
rhb wrote:In one instance I had been asked to fix a problem with a vendor package for which the client paid $80,000/yr for support.
And how much exactly did you pay for VirtualBox? And vendor/client involves some sort of contract. So I assume that you can contact your Oracle support representative for details.
rhb wrote:I had 7 DVDs because I was migrating a bare metal instance to a VM.
A p2v is a totally different procedure. It's not a fresh installation. Can you understand the differences? You titled the thread as "installing", you never talked about p2v.
rhb wrote:I very much doubt that thousands and thousand of users have installed Windows in a VM on *any* Solaris instance. Yes, it works on Windows hosts, but I want to have ZFS as the host OS which makes Hipster the host of choice.
It' not Hipster, it's not ZFS, it's none of those things. See below...
rhb wrote:if it takes someone like me 20+ hours to make it work.
There you go...

I'll let the Solaris Hipster experts and/or your Oracle support representative continue to assist you. It seems that you need professional help...
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rhb
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Re: [Solved] Installing guests on Hipster 2017.10

Post by rhb »

I'm not sure why you got off on your rant. I simply made a factual statement. Installing is just the first step. Then it becomes necessary to actually configure things so they work. Not being able to load the Guest Additions ISO from the installation directory or from a copy in the user's filesystem is not the hallmark of quality work.

You seem to forget that Debian was a fresh install. Do you really expect that someone moving Windows to a virtual machine is going to go buy Windows when they already have it? Especially if they have a lot of software installed on the Windows machine?

I bought a 3 year GOLD support contract from Sun for my Ultra 20. Before that i had a support contract from DEC/Compaq for my Alpha. I don't currently have a contract with Oracle because Oracle doesn't want my business. Larry made that very clear when he took control. If Oracle had support for VBox that actually responded in a timely fashion I'd have no issue paying so long as it wasn't $3k/yr for a single instance. But I'd have to see some actual ability and customer service first. All I've seen so far is an attitude problem.

For the little that it is worth, I was administering VMS 4.x 30 years ago and have used every major Unix version and many of the minor versions as well as many other OEM OSes and flavors of Linux. But yeah, I'm a dumbshit because I don't intuitively recognize hieroglyphics when I'm trying to read screen messages obscured by misplaced dialog boxes.

I'm not going to bother to configure a signature, but here it is:

We all get what we deserve whether we want it or not, either as individuals or members of a group. Sometimes it's as punishment and sometimes it's a blessing. Which is always ambiguous and depends entirely upon what we do next.
rhb
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Joined: 21. Dec 2017, 02:16

Re: [Solved] Installing guests on Hipster 2017.10

Post by rhb »

A brief summary:

VBox 5.2.4 does not like booting from an optical drive. It sometimes does and sometimes doesn't with no indication of why it is unhappy. This is even when the case when rmvolmgr is disabled. It *is* possible to install Windows 7 Pro from a system image set and repair disk, however, it is highly unreliable. The same applies to installing Debian 9.3 from a physical disk.

Disk2vhd will create a bootable image which works properly. Booting Debian from a virtual ISO works properly.

In this ordeal I got lots of stupid error messages from VBox, such as "failed to unmount" when attempting to mount and vice versa. I shall post a more detailed description of the process on the Hipster wiki once I've had time to run do a test of the entire using a bare disk. But I've got a ZFS pool on Solaris 10 upgrade to larger disks to do first.
socratis
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Re: [Solved] Installing guests on Hipster 2017.10

Post by socratis »

rhb wrote:VBox 5.2.4 does not like booting from an optical drive.
I would hesitate to generalize with one, single data point. I could as easily have said that "<YourFavoriteCauseOfFailure>" is the culprit. I don't remember VirtualBox being the source of failure for this kind of operation.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Please provide the latter. I would start by testing different hardware/software combinations; computer, CD drive, CDs, host OS, VirtualBox versions, etc. There should be n*(n-1) combinations for you to try out.
Do NOT send me Personal Messages (PMs) for troubleshooting, they are simply deleted.
Do NOT reply with the "QUOTE" button, please use the "POST REPLY", at the bottom of the form.
If you obfuscate any information requested, I will obfuscate my response. These are virtual UUIDs, not real ones.
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