virtualbox.org

I am occasionally getthing these in my Linux guest. Windows host does not report any IO errors in its system log.

[ 4905.010956] ata1.00: cmd ca/00:08:e7:86:be/00:00:00:00:00/e0 tag 0 dma 4096 out
[ 4905.010956] res 40/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
[ 4905.013353] ata1.00: status: { DRDY }
[ 4905.014139] ata1: soft resetting link
[ 4905.182172] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/33
[ 4905.182182] ata1: EH complete
[ 4905.193602] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 16777216 512-byte hardware sectors (8590 MB)
[ 4905.195358] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
[ 4905.195361] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
[ 4905.198190] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA

Vbox.log from this session is attached.

Note: I am fairly new to VirtualBox and not that great on linux.

To me it sounds like you have an old ATA hard drive that is having some problems reading/writing then it retries.

How old is your hard drive? If it's fairly new then this is probably not what is happening. If it is, then old hard drives did have issues sometimes but when retried would usually work.