virtualbox.org

That part is working properly you should leave it alone.
Did you turn off the Windows Firewall?

Yeah - no firewalls or virus scanners or anything. All off.

OK lets do something different. Shut down the guest (not saved state)
Reverse the hostonly to adapter 2 and the NAT to adapter 1. Save and start the guest. run ifconfig -a and post it here

Ok - will do that now.

Also - just looked in /etc/network/interfaces

Only lo and eth0 are defined:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp


Shouldnt there be something in there for eth1 as well?

Yes there should. But I have found that Ubuntu is somewhat lacking in that area. I will give you the way to make this work hard code if what I think is going to happen happens.

Ok, done that.

Now ifconfig -a shows three adapters still, but:

eth0 has IP 10.0.2.15 Bcast:10.0.2.255

eth1 has no ip info

lo has 127. etc as before.

I can ping the web now from the guest, so eth0 seems to be working as it should now with nat.

OK lets add the hostonly manually and see if the guest and the host can start.
add
auto eth1
iface eth1 inet dhcp
to the interfaces file save and exit.
Then run /etc/init.d/networking restart. Then run ifconfig -a and see if it picks up the address 192.168.56.X

I think I've made a bit of an error.

I didn't read your post properly, and after adding that to the interfaces file I restarted the guest OS, rather than restarting networking. And it wont restart...!

It hangs on

[ 4.111631] piix4_smbus 0000:00:07.0: SMBus base address uninitialized - upgrade BIOS or use force_addr=0xaddr

Does the same if I select the safe mode option.

OK start in safe mode (press the escape key at boot and select recovery mode) edit the file and remove the command you entered.

Well I didn't read the last line right. But is should start in recovery mode. Give it time and see if it can get past it.

ok. I'll leave it going. See what happens. Thanks a lot for all your help.

If it doesnt shift, maybe I should reinstall the guest OS and start again.

Sounds like a good idea. I am outta here until tomorrow.
Good luck.

What does /etc/network/interfaces look like?

I've gone ahead and set up a new virtual machine, and a new hard drive, and installed ubuntu again from scratch, as I couldnt get the last machine to boot after the interfaces file change.

It's gone straight back to the same situation

ifconfig shows eth0 and lo, eth0 with a 10. ip address

ifconfig -a also shows eth1, but with no ip.

/etc/network/interfaces contains

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp