VirtualBox doesn´t find any bood medium

Roxxor · Post by **Roxxor** » 18. Feb 2009, 23:03

Ok, now I have installed Ubuntu on my other IDE hard drive (so now I have one SATA drive and one IDE drive in my computer).

The SATA is the primary drive and the IDE the secondary.

I am running VirtualBox on Vista Business 64 bit and Ubuntu is the guest system.

I cannot start Ubuntu since it says it cannot find any boot medium.

Why can´t it find the boot medium?

EDIT: Do I need to install Ubuntu through VirtualBox to get it working?
If yes, do I have to install it on my virtual hard disk that I create with VirtualBox? Won´t it destroy my physical hard disk?

Post by **TerryE** » 18. Feb 2009, 23:23

A raw VMDK virtualises the MBR, so the MBR in your VM does not contain a bootstrap loader by default. The easiest way to do this is to boot your VM with the RAW VMDK mapped and also with a liveCD or your Ubuntu distro as a liveCD and boot from the CD/ISO. You can now run grub-install --root-directory=... to rehook the grub loader in your VM to align it to your physical MBR.

Roxxor · Post by **Roxxor** » 18. Feb 2009, 23:32

Thanks!

I also found this answer in the FAQ:

Q: When I start my VM, I get an error stating that no boot medium was found. How do I solve this?

A:Please read more about Virtual Machines so you know what VirtualBox actually does. Basically it comes to that it 'simulates' a computer with hardware and everything. The Guest does not know about the Host or it's hardware. So you have to install a seperate Operating System in it before you can really use VirtualBox.
Also make sure that if you want to boot from a CD/DVD or ISO, that it actually is bootable.

Do I have to install Ubuntu through VirtualBox or can I just run the liveCD from VirtualBox and then install a boot manager?

Post by **TerryE** » 19. Feb 2009, 01:56

Roxxor wrote:I also found this answer in the FAQ

Yes, I wrote it. You already have an installation of Ubuntu that will boot in the VM so you don't need to reinstall. All you need to do is run the liveCD in the VM and do the grub-install.

The one thing that I know that you'll need to much around with is /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules, because you will see two different MAC addresses, so you will need to put in code to toggle the latch parameters.

Roxxor · Post by **Roxxor** » 19. Feb 2009, 17:15

Thanks! Got it working now. Have some other questions, but I will take them in another thread.