Fatal Could not read from boot medium for any .iso

[alex::oracle]

additional information:

I checked the bios, VT is enabled
Boot from EFI and legacy, with priotity to legacy is enabled.

When I activate Settings system enable EFI, I come to the UEFI shell.
There I see FS1 ... CDROM
When I FS1: ls
I see install.nsh and efi/boot/ bootia64.efi.
when i start the bootia64.efi, nothing happens.

I also checked description of the VM to have Debian64bit.

[alex::oracle]

that is correct and in the system tab>motherboard>boot order you do have the CD/DVD listed first correct?

yes, I even tried to have only CD/DVD activated...

I also tried to install from usb stick; the same problems.

Could it have to do with the Win host?

Alex

[loukingjr]

did you try with EFI disabled for the guest?

[alex::oracle]

yes, this was what i did first.
I enabled efi just to see if it changes something...

[loukingjr]

I don't know why you can't boot any .iso. Normally the "Fatal Could not read from boot medium" error means the virtual HD has no OS installed but it should boot from an .iso.

If you have a vbox.log for any guest you tried, compress it and attach it here. You should also attach the "VBoxSVC.log".

[mpack]

I would put that a little more emphatically: that particular error message is well proven, it never lies. If it says that you have no bootable medium attached to the VM, then... you have no bootable medium attached to the VM. It's really up to the user to find out why - it shouldn't be hard. Typically, either the ISO isn't bootable, or it isn't mounted in the CD drive, or the CD drive isn't enabled in the boot order.

[loukingjr]

I know but he said he's tried several .isos, he seems to be mounting them correctly although it didn't occur to me the CD Drive might be disabled. Would seem to be an odd thing to disable when you are trying to mount an .iso (not to mention he is mounting .isos) but stranger things have happened on here.

[Perryg]

Wait a second. ia64 is for an itanium not x86. I doubt that is what you really want.

[loukingjr]

Wait a second. ia64 is for an itanium not x86. I doubt that is what you really want.

Good catch Perry. The Itanium Debian .iso certainly gives a fatal boot error.

Not sure why the OP was trying those but his machine uses normal Intel i3-i7 chips depending on price.

[loukingjr]

alex, try one of these…
http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/7.8.0/amd64/iso-cd/

[alex::oracle]

You got it!
I was in doubt and tested the i386 iso which did not work because (as I found out now) you need to adapt the description (settings> general>version) to 32bit (I thought this is descriptive only).

I also learned the following for intel core ix:

If you want 64-bit, choose "amd64." If you want 32-bit, choose "i386.

So now, both i386 and amd64 boot.
Thank you!

Alex

[loukingjr]

YVW. I'm glad Perry noticed the architecture faux pas.

[mpack]

Are IA64 chips capable of running 16bit x86 code? Is the BIOS typically different? I've never used Itanium, so I'm wondering why the user would get this particular error.

Likewise if the user fails to select a 32bit template when installing a 32bit OS. AFAIK, the bootloader is the same either way.

[loukingjr]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IA-64

[mpack]

I already read that, thanks. It talks about chipsets and architectures, but doesn't (AFAICS) mention instruction sets or boot details. I.e. the practical differences from other options.

Reading between the lines, I gather that it probably has a different instruction set, but I wanted to establish it it's incapable of running legacy 16 and 32bit code.