Suse10.3 guest won't recognize virtual hd after clonevdi

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eikukaan
Posts: 5
Joined: 26. Nov 2007, 20:30

Suse10.3 guest won't recognize virtual hd after clonevdi

Post by eikukaan »

Hi,

I hope somebody can help me, or maybe the innotek guys themself. I got a Suse10.3 installed on my Suse10.1, so I have a VM which can be carried around or used by other people (for demonstration purposes). So far everything went fine, but when I tried today to clone the image the newly created vdi-file boots, but only the first steps and finally stops by complaining that VB is waiting for

/dev/disks/by-id/scsi-xxxxxxxx-part2 to appear

The problems seams to be that clonedvi changed the ids of the virtual harddrives but Suse somehow still expects the ones from the original. As there have been many people here having problems, but (unless I missed it) not this one I assume this could be some problem of Suse10.3 as guest. But I'm new to VB, so maybe I'm missing something simple.

I even merged all snapshots into the current state and else this is a pretty fresh install, so actually nothing special.

Has anybody an idea what's going on or how to fix the problem ?

Thanks a lot for any help.

Michael
eikukaan
Posts: 5
Joined: 26. Nov 2007, 20:30

nobody has an idea ?

Post by eikukaan »

Quite some people checked the post, but nobody replied.

does that mean

nobody has any clue ?
-> so maybe my description was too bad, not detailed enough ?
-> or that was ok, but this looks like a bug, so I should add it to the bug-tracker ?

???? :-(

Michael
Ingo
Volunteer
Posts: 731
Joined: 22. Aug 2007, 10:13
Location: Germany

Post by Ingo »

Seems nobody else has this problem.
What is if you only copy the VDI?
eikukaan
Posts: 5
Joined: 26. Nov 2007, 20:30

Post by eikukaan »

Ingo wrote:Seems nobody else has this problem.
What is if you only copy the VDI?
I tried it today under windows and this works ok. Nevertheless I'm not happy if the "official" way doesn't work (cloning and getting new ids).

Is it just my impression or is the way VirtualBox handles the transfer of VMs to other systems not (yet?) really well ?. I assumed it's as easy as with VMWare (even though I didn't test this much to be sure), where you just put all the files on the new system and run the vmx file. E.g. today on windows VB created a new network card and thus the network didn't work out of the box. Now if I would like to give an easily running VM to "normal" people I don't want them to have to create a virtual machine first and then fix hardware-settings which shouldn't have been changed in the first place. I can't expect normal users to start to find out why the network doesn't work and fix it themself - at least in the realms of what the creator of the VM could foresee - e.g. I used a NAT-network with DHCP and should get pretty surely access to the net if the host has it.

So I'm once again thinking about doing the whole stuff again under VMWare and hope I get a bit more plug-and-play behavior for the intended audience of my setup.

Michael

P.S.: thanks for the reply, Ingo :-)
manpro
Posts: 2
Joined: 13. Dec 2007, 17:10
Location: Germany

same problem

Post by manpro »

Hi,

ok, I got the same problem

Code: Select all

Waiting for device /dev/disk ...
also with SuSE 10.3 after clonevdi

Has somebody a solution now or an idea for a solution?

Thanks
eikukaan
Posts: 5
Joined: 26. Nov 2007, 20:30

Re: same problem

Post by eikukaan »

manpro wrote:Hi,

ok, I got the same problem

Code: Select all

Waiting for device /dev/disk ...
also with SuSE 10.3 after clonevdi

Has somebody a solution now or an idea for a solution?

Thanks
If you got also the problem with Suse10.3, it's getting pretty probable that it's due to Suse10.3. If you can, just copy the VDI file and it works, unless you want to reuse the virtual drive for another VM on the same machine. Then you're out of luck.

Michael
manpro
Posts: 2
Joined: 13. Dec 2007, 17:10
Location: Germany

Post by manpro »

Thanks,
and what did you do against the message "Failed to register the hard disk ..." from the Virtual Disk Manager?
eikukaan
Posts: 5
Joined: 26. Nov 2007, 20:30

Post by eikukaan »

manpro wrote:Thanks,
and what did you do against the message "Failed to register the hard disk ..." from the Virtual Disk Manager?
Nothing. This is why you need to clone the VDI, so it gets new UIDs to use it on the same system. But if you put them on a fresh system (or possibly other system without the original UIDs yet used) the virtual disk manager doesn't complain and you can use the VDI for a new VM.

For my purposes I use now VMware - I actually just started with VB because I just own a Windows license for VMware, but wanted to create the VM under Linux - my workplace system.

Michael
nicholasgray
Posts: 1
Joined: 22. Dec 2007, 00:20

SuSE 10.3, Vboxdrv, /trunk/src/VBox/Installer/linux

Post by nicholasgray »

Having the same problem so many have, no vboxdrv. Running SuSE 10.3. I have tried most of the suggestions offered in virtualbox.org Forum and in SuSE Linux Forum to no avail. I don't read German, Danish, Spanish, Russian/Ukrainian, or Japanese but I can read the language of Complaint re: vboxdrv.

The http://virtualbox.org/svn/vbox/trunk/sr ... ler/linux/ has several shell scripts, most of which aren't very old. I am especially interested in vboxdrv.sh and VBox.sh.

Could these be FIXES?
wpavel
Posts: 3
Joined: 10. Jan 2008, 17:04

cloning Suse 10.3

Post by wpavel »

(Virtualbox 1.5.4, OpenSuse 10.3, [Ubuntu 7.10, WindowsXP SP2])
Hallo,
I got the same problem, cloning a VM with Suse 10.3, while booting this clone the system hangs waiting for the harddisk.
The problem is only with SuseLinux; - using cloned Ubuntu or WindowsXP as guests works fine without errors.
The reason is the UUID of the virtual harddisk, which is changed in the clone, but in the installed Linux system the old one ist used.
I am not very experienced in Linux, but I made the following experiment; I think it is not really a solution.
I set the cloned harddisk as second harddisk (primary slave) for the original Suse VM. Then I startet the original Suse VM.
In the running Suse VM I made a new directory and mounted it to the root directory of the cloned harddisk.
Then I startet (as root) the Yast partition manager and noticed the UUID of the cloned harddisk. (It is made from the UUID shown with vboxmanage list hdds, but it is not the same).
Then I edited (as root) the /boot/grub/menu.lst and the /etc/fstab : I changed the UUID everywhere the old one was (do not use capital letters instead of small letters).
Now shutdown (after unmounting the cloned root directory)
Then I disabled the cloned harddisk as second harddisk in the original VM and set it as first harddisk in the cloned VM.
Starting the cloned VM now works.
But I think there are some side effects. For example did not work internet connection in the cloned system. I did not try to look for the reason.
Perhaps it is possible, to change grub/menu.lst and etc/fstab with Grub itself, before booting the cloned system instead of manipulating the cloned system by the original system; but I did not try it.
I think, this all can be only an experiment, not a practicable solution.
Perhaps somebody finds some?
W.Pavel
ricoch3n
Posts: 2
Joined: 24. Jan 2008, 03:58

Post by ricoch3n »

Hi wpavel,
Your "experiment" is making a lot of sense here actually. I have a similar setup, i.e. 10.3 OpenSuSE as host and guest, except I was using lilo as the bootloader which turns out to be a problem when implementing the method you tried. The problem has something to do with lilo because it requires the command "lilo" to be run after the configuration file "/etc/lilo.conf" got changed. With grub, no additional command is needed. Therefore I converted the bootloader into grub and everything works after updating uuid info in /boot/grub/menu.lst and /etc/fstab of the cloned harddisk.

Actually the "side effect" you mentioned is not really a issue and it can be easily solved. I don't know what kind of network setting you have for the cloned vm, but I'm using multiple bridged tap's (that is, devices tap0, tap1, tap2 ... are bridged with eth0 through uml-utils and bridge-utils, let me know if you need more information on how to set it up under OpenSUSE). Back to the networking problem, I simply assigned another tap device that is available (say tap1, tap0 is being used by the first vm) to the second vm. When the second vm booted, Its eth0 stopped working because the mac address of the cloned system changes and eth0 got automatically renamed to eth1. All I had to do was to configure eth1 with the settings of eth0 and delete eth0 and whola, I got the network working.

Anyway, you've just saved me tons of work on installing 10.3 over and over again. Thanks for the post.
frank
Oracle Corporation
Posts: 3362
Joined: 7. Jun 2007, 09:11
Primary OS: Debian Sid
VBox Version: PUEL
Guest OSses: Linux, Windows
Location: Dresden, Germany
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Post by frank »

As I wrote into another article (http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=3014), the problem is that the hard disk changes its identification when attaching to a new VM. You have to adapt that string in your /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst. Or just change the /dev/disks/by-id/scsi-... to /dev/sda2.
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