VDI Won't Load

[JBrewer]

Running guest Centos 7 64 bit on virtualbox 5.0.14 on OS X 10.5.10.

I was running some processor intensive work on the guest which crashed the VM. Nothing would shut it down so I had to force quit virtualbox from the host OS.

The VM went into an aborted state and wouldn't load, after a few attempts at starting it will now run and stay in the running state. When starting Centos the boot options are displayed and the guest appears to boot up but it gets stuck on a black screen.

I have attached a log file.

I don't have any snapshots and the prev xml file has been overwritten with the file that doesn't appear to launch the OS.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[socratis]

I don't have any snapshots and the prev xml file has been overwritten with the file that doesn't appear to launch the OS

No, actually it does launch the VM, otherwise VirtualBox would have a very specific error and you would know about it.

From the log, I see that the VM starts up normally, you suspend at 1:50, resume at 2:01, suspend at 2:32, resume at 2:36. Why? Unfortunately you didn't shutdown the VM or powered it off, so the log ends prematurely. Try again please, this time with no suspend/resume and a complete VM shutdown.

[JBrewer]

It does load, the centos boot menu comes up, I can choose the kernel to load.

Loading appears to proceed but the screen stays in a black state.

At 00:00:23.763944 the machine appears to have loaded but the black screen appears.

At 00:02:17.797098 the machine was shutdown with the 'Send the shutdown signal' option. The machine then stays in the black screen state and doesn't shutdown, the logs show the state being set back to running (but the black screen is still present), I did nothing to influence this.

The only way to quit is to 'Power off the machine'.

[mpack]

In no particular order :-

• You still have the GAs ISO mounted in the VM. It's good practice to eject this.
• 1171x706 is a really nasty display size (apparantly set by a mode hint?!). Not a choice I would recommend. Unfortunately I don't know enough about CentOS guests to tell you how to force a more rational size.

That's about all I can see in the way of arguable errors.

Have you tried enabling 3D acceleration? Perhaps your VM is expecting it.

[socratis]

1171x706 is a really nasty display size (apparantly set by a mode hint?!).

Or a "drag-the-window-to-what-it-feels-nice" user action? Mode hints require CLI know-how

@JBrewer
Mpack's advice of toggling the 3D option in the VM settings seems to be the thing to try...

[JBrewer]

The 3D acceleration option was on for the last log.

I toggled it, restarted but it didn't help.

When resizing the window the following logs are written (the black screen is still present):

00:00:54.163308 GUI: UIMachineView::sltPerformGuestResize: Sending guest size-hint to screen 0 as 1193x822
00:00:54.163376 VMMDev: SetVideoModeHint: Got a video mode hint (1193x822x32)@(0x0),(1;0) at 0
00:00:54.176955 GUI: UIMachineView::sltPerformGuestResize: Sending guest size-hint to screen 0 as 1193x822
00:00:54.177014 VMMDev: SetVideoModeHint: Got a video mode hint (1193x822x32)@(0x0),(1;0) at 0

[mpack]

The 3D acceleration option was on for the last log.

I see no evidence of that in the log (plain English translation: no it wasn't).

[JBrewer]

Here's a log with 3D acceleration definitely enabled. Does that give any clues?

Usually I run it enabled, I must have turned it off before to try it without it.

I am beginning to think this might be a Centos issue? I can at least recover files from the VDI so I can re-install again but it would be quicker if I could get this VDI running.

The issues started after an unclean shutdown since I had to force a stop after a processor intensive process crashed the VM. Is there any way to avoid this in the future?

[mpack]

As a side note: it would be nice if you compressed your logs before attaching them: help save a virtual tree. It will also avoid your running into the attachment size limit, which you are dangerously close to with that last log.

Ok, the last log does now show 3D acceleration enabled. If that doesn't fix the black screen issue then I'm afraid I'm out of ideas - other than suggestion that you run an OpenGL test app on your host, just in case there's some problem with your host graphics stack.

[JBrewer]

Open GL works OK on the host.

I have created another Centos guest and it works OK.