No bootable medium found

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thany
Posts: 108
Joined: 24. Dec 2008, 02:35

No bootable medium found

Post by thany »

I've just upgraded Virtualbox to 5.2.6. I don't remember which version I came from, but it couldn't have been older than 4 weeks, since that's how old my pc is. I had one VM installed, Linux Mint latest version. I had set it up as an EFI (ticked that box). It worked fine. Brilliant actually.

Now after the upgrade I got into the EFI shell after booting. I turned off EFI to see why, because the EFI shell doesn't tell me why *it* is starting instead of the OS. "No bootable medium found" is the answer.

I checked and double-checked. The harddisk is configured correctly. The boot order is configured correctly. There's no way I have misconfigured anything in this regard (mind you, I have some experience with setting up Virtualbox VMs). Besides, it worked fine until today and I haven't changed anything expect the upgrade.

I've also tried to change from PIIX3 to ICH9. No difference.
I've checked again and the harddisk isn't empty or anything. The installed OS is still there, just waiting to get booted someday.

What can I do to fix this?
I'm probably running the latest everything. Yolo.
mpack
Site Moderator
Posts: 39156
Joined: 4. Sep 2008, 17:09
Primary OS: MS Windows 10
VBox Version: PUEL
Guest OSses: Mostly XP

Re: No bootable medium found

Post by mpack »

thany wrote: Now after the upgrade I got into the EFI shell after booting. I turned off EFI to see why, because the EFI shell doesn't tell me why *it* is starting instead of the OS. "No bootable medium found" is the answer.
Bing! Logic error. If you installed Linux into an EFI VM then it used GPT partitioning, which is not supported by the VirtualBox legacy BIOS. So turning off EFI is the reason you get "No bootable medium found", and it has nothing to do with the original EFI problem - which is most likely because you didn't fix the EFI boot script (Perry has posted the fix a few times, I don't have it to hand). Google for "VM boots to EFI shell".
socratis
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Location: Greece

Re: No bootable medium found

Post by socratis »

Just a clarification; booting to the EFI shell is the equivalent of "FATAL: Could not read from the boot medium! System halted." for a traditional BIOS. Just create a VM with EFI enabled and no medium at all to see it. I'm not saying that there is no bootable medium or that the nsh script might not be needed, but that would be the exact same message if there was no medium at all. Or if it was corrupted.

You could try and press F12 (bash it, you might miss it, if you do HostKey+R » try again) and see what boot options you have. If you can see your HD for example listed/enumerated in the EFI menu. Something like:
Image

Image

There were a couple of changes in the EFI related section in 5.2.2 (2017-11-22), but that was mostly for HFS+ hard drives, where an ending NULL character was throwing off the sorting of the partitions. I'm not sure if you would setup your Linux guest with an HFS+ partition, but I highly doubt it...
Do NOT send me Personal Messages (PMs) for troubleshooting, they are simply deleted.
Do NOT reply with the "QUOTE" button, please use the "POST REPLY", at the bottom of the form.
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thany
Posts: 108
Joined: 24. Dec 2008, 02:35

Re: No bootable medium found

Post by thany »

If the problem can be fixed with some script, can you (talking to the vbox devs) release an official update that includes the fix? Installing some script is a bit silly, tbh.

I didn't install with HFS+ of course. It's just default, default and default. So whatever the default is for Linux Mint, that's what I have :)
I'm probably running the latest everything. Yolo.
mpack
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Posts: 39156
Joined: 4. Sep 2008, 17:09
Primary OS: MS Windows 10
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Re: No bootable medium found

Post by mpack »

That would be asking the devs to fix problems with the Linux installer, so that would be a no.

VirtualBox provides a BIOS, and it provides a simulation of a disk drive. It has no control over what a given OS might store on the drive.

I don't know what's so odd about a boot script. Grub has existed for years, and VirtualBox does nothing to ensure that grub scripts run properly: that's the job of whomever writes the script.
Perryg
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Re: No bootable medium found

Post by Perryg »

Here is the link Don was talking about viewtopic.php?f=3&t=61970#p289297

But if you only upgraded and did nothing else I wonder why this would need to be revisited. I would suggest the OP sees if they can work through the shell to see what the issue really is. Something must have changed that makes a difference or you would not be seeing the shell.

Note: I don't usually run EFI anything so I don't have a Debian type OS installed as EFI at present. If need be I can test this but only if everything else fails.
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