Upgrade to 2.2.4 hosed Solaris 10 guest?

[jjsmithct]

I was running VBox 2.2.2 on Windows XP host. One of my guests is Solaris 10 u6.

I installed 2.2.4, which initially caused me a few problems - could not use my vpn client, and windows networking was left in a somewhat hosed condition. However after reboot, these problems resolved.

Continuing on, I ran my Solaris 10 guest, which had been in a saved state before the upgrade. It was working ok, but I shut it down in order to test something on reboot.

Now when I start this VM, I immediately get thrown into the GRUB command line. From there - I can't seem to do anything - it seems to be able to see no files. Thinking that maybe it was 2.2.4 related, I uninstalled it, and re-installed 2.2.2. Still the same thing.

I don't know if anyone here has had this problem, or if this is where I'd get help at this point, but I'm looking for some guidance as far as anything I can do from the grub cli in order to find the boot fs on this OS and get it going. It is ZFS boot.

Thanks!

[Sasquatch]

Have you tried some basic GRUB trouble shooting using the web? I know that when installing a Linux system, and your grub is hosed and need to be reinstalled, you first check where the GRUB config is at. You do that with find /boot/grub/stage1. Maybe a reinstall of GRUB will fix it if you actually get a response of found files.

Btw, moving to Solaris Guests, as this is not a Host specific problem.

[jjsmithct]

Thanks Sasquatch.

I got it back, however not in any sane way. I ran the installer just to quit out and get a console, but still had no access to the disk (just the ramdisk). I poked around a while, and quit out. When I started the VM back up expecting to get grub again, the OS booted. So - something the installer did tweaked it somehow?

Don't like solving problems like that, but at least it's back.

Thanks for you reply. And just in response, yes I spent a bit of time combing the web for answers and looking through the GRUB manuals. Problem was that none of the commands were doing anything - nothing was mounted and it could not access any files at all. All attempts to "find" anything failed. Couldn't load a kernel, or boot...

Thanks again.

[Perryg]

Something to think about here. I updated while I had machines in a saved state one time and that was such a mess I have never failed to shut down the guests before an update again. I had 5 out of 19 guests that I had to tweak to get back!

[sej7278]

Something to think about here. I updated while I had machines in a saved state one time and that was such a mess I have never failed to shut down the guests before an update again. I had 5 out of 19 guests that I had to tweak to get back!

yes i deleted a snapshot once between upgrades and ended up having to delete the whole vdi including hand-removing the config from virtualbox.xml as the gui could do nothing with it.

there is something a bit iffy about solaris guests still i think, the other day i suddenly had no xorg (was working fine previously even with ga) then upgraded to 2.2.4 and it works again, not sure if it was due to the installer or a coincidence - maybe it would have also been fixed had i booted it again in 2.2.2.... that said, window resizing still kills gnome after a couple of attempts.

[SSCBrian]

Something to think about here. I updated while I had machines in a saved state one time and that was such a mess I have never failed to shut down the guests before an update again. I had 5 out of 19 guests that I had to tweak to get back!

Yep, I noticed that with the 2.x series of VBox too. Back in 1.x days, I was able to upgrade fine with saved sessions, but doing that a couple times in 2.x has resulted in completely trashed VMs! "Don't do that"

[SSCBrian]

Something to think about here. I updated while I had machines in a saved state one time and that was such a mess I have never failed to shut down the guests before an update again. I had 5 out of 19 guests that I had to tweak to get back!

yes i deleted a snapshot once between upgrades and ended up having to delete the whole vdi including hand-removing the config from virtualbox.xml as the gui could do nothing with it.

there is something a bit iffy about solaris guests still i think, the other day i suddenly had no xorg (was working fine previously even with ga) then upgraded to 2.2.4 and it works again, not sure if it was due to the installer or a coincidence - maybe it would have also been fixed had i booted it again in 2.2.2.... that said, window resizing still kills gnome after a couple of attempts.

What is your host OS? I haven't seen any weird Solaris guest issues (other than the crashing under 2.2.2 and earlier and the window resizing). Window resizing only kills gnome if I try to shrink a window. As long as I just keep expanding it, no problems.

[sej7278]

What is your host OS? I haven't seen any weird Solaris guest issues (other than the crashing under 2.2.2 and earlier and the window resizing). Window resizing only kills gnome if I try to shrink a window. As long as I just keep expanding it, no problems.

that's what i'm talking about - if the guest starts with the window maximised and i want to shrink it down to 1024x768 it dies, that's not good enough is it?! fedora10 64-bit host.

[jjsmithct]

Yep, I noticed that with the 2.x series of VBox too. Back in 1.x days, I was able to upgrade fine with saved sessions, but doing that a couple times in 2.x has resulted in completely trashed VMs! "Don't do that"

Point taken. I won't be doing that again.

I also have gnome constantly crashing upon resizing. After powering down all my VM's, I'm going to re-upgrade to 2.2.4 and see how that behaves.