Program freeze on startup after I/O error installing Arch Linux

Discussions about using Linux guests in VirtualBox.
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TheoCGaming
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Joined: 9. Jul 2022, 23:09

Program freeze on startup after I/O error installing Arch Linux

Post by TheoCGaming »

I went to create an Arch Linux guest USB stick (note: Hyper-V is being used) and it threw an I/O error saying the disk was full... what? The disk was freshly formatted mere minutes before I tried installing it! I checked everything and eventually ignored it. I unpaused the VM and it got stuck again. Similar error. I continued ignoring the errors and stopped them from popping up, until I couldn't unpause the VM anymore, I figured it finally hit a fatal error. I then tried closing the viewport and it wouldn't close. Only when a "Program may be busy" pop-up appeared was I able to close it. I then tried popping it back up to see that the VM manager was entirely frozen. I was running this out of a terminal, so I was able to quickly close it. When I reopened it, however, I wasn't able to do anything and the VM showed as "paused". That's where I'm at now with a frozen VBox manager window and I can't do anything about it.
TheoCGaming
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Joined: 9. Jul 2022, 23:09

Re: Program freeze on startup after I/O error installing Arch Linux

Post by TheoCGaming »

Note: Host machine is Arch Linux running XFCE4 with 16GB RAM, GTX 960 GPU, and an i3 550 processor.
fth0
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Re: Program freeze on startup after I/O error installing Arch Linux

Post by fth0 »

You didn't clearly say which disk is reported to be full and which disk was freshly formatted. Either the host disk is full or the (virtual) guest disk is full. Both can happen ...
TheoCGaming
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Joined: 9. Jul 2022, 23:09

Re: Program freeze on startup after I/O error installing Arch Linux

Post by TheoCGaming »

The USB stick is fresh, and neither are full. The USB stick is *considered* full by VBox, however. The USB stick is *not* read-only.
TheoCGaming
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Joined: 9. Jul 2022, 23:09

Re: Program freeze on startup after I/O error installing Arch Linux

Post by TheoCGaming »

Also, I was able to unfreeze VBox by killing the processes that were responsible for running the VM, which somehow were able to survive the vbox manager being killed from the terminal it was running from.
mpack
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Re: Program freeze on startup after I/O error installing Arch Linux

Post by mpack »

USB sticks are not usually suitable for hosting a VM. For one thing they are desperately unreliable, with a tendency to slow to a crawl for no obvious reason. Second, people often format them with FAT, which doesn't support the file sizes generally need for a VM. The latter could be what that "disk is full" error is about. Third, being a removable drive people to to remove them - without warning. Which would possibly corrupt the VM.
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