Fatal: No Bootable medium found

[Bsten]

I am a newest of the new so please direct me to the correct forum if needed. I have been running Mint with no problems except the following started today. My mouse arrow turned into a small ball and trying to change it in the task bar did not work. Take the arrow out of mint and all is ok. Then I tried to reboot to see if that would help and get the following: "Fatal: no bootable medium found system halted. The VM shows Mint being there. What have I done to cause these issues?

[mpack]

Then I tried to reboot to see if that would help and get the following: "Fatal: no bootable medium found system halted.

That probably means that you never actually installed Mint. You've been running it on live CD mode all this time and relying on the "save state" feature to maintain data persistence? At some point the Mint setup CD must been removed from the drive too, hence the reboot failure.

If that's what you did then any data is gone. To get data to survive a reset you must install the guest OS properly to the (virtual) hd, not run as a live CD. Then you can safely eject the install CD as well.

[Bsten]

Thank you for the quick response, very much appreciated. Mint was installed for me but I understand what you wrote. I am using this to learn Linux with the end result of doing away with windows.
The install was done with an ISO file on my desktop. Can you explain what I need to do to reinstall Mint to the virtual machine? If I'm "pressing" to hard I understand and appreciate your effort so far.
Brian

[socratis]

Linux LiveCDs have a "Try" option where you boot temporarily from the ISO, or an "Install" option where you install the distribution on the (virtual) hard drive of your (virtual) computer.

What 'mpack' was referring to was the first option, where you didn't actually install the OS in your virtual hard drive. Which if upon reboot the LiveCD was removed, then you couldn't boot from the empty virtual hard drive.