Unable to boot a VM from a USB floppy

Gian-Piero · Post by **Gian-Piero** » 29. Dec 2008, 17:02

I have installed VirtualBox 2.0.6 OSE on openSUSE 11.0.All is functioning correctly, except for the floppy drive. This is a USB floppy, it functions correctly under openSUSE (I can boot from it). It is recognized in a virtual machine, but when I want to boot in the VM, I get the following message:
"Could not read from the boot medium. System halted"
What do I have to do?
Thank you for your answer.

Post by **Sasquatch** » 31. Dec 2008, 00:15

Do you have USB enabled in the VM? If so, disable it, as it might grab the floppy drive and you will lose it in the VM.

Gian-Piero · Post by **Gian-Piero** » 3. Jan 2009, 11:46

Thank you for your answer.
I have the OSE version of virtualbox, and it does not support USB. I have to install the Sun version.

Post by **Sasquatch** » 4. Jan 2009, 18:25

You can boot from it, that means that your Host BIOS sees it correctly as floppy. However, there are reports here of anothe user that had the floppy drive listed as /dev/sd* instead of /dev/fd*. If you have that too, that it's listed as a hard drive, then you're out of luck.

Gian-Piero · Post by **Gian-Piero** » 6. Jan 2009, 13:22

Yes, my floppy is listed as /dev/sdb1 instead of /dev/fd1.
I have tried to correct this by setting the environment variable:
export VBOX_FLOPPY='/dev/sdb1'
but this did not change anything.