virtualbox.org

I think I may just be being dim but I have a problem with the disk subsystem under VirtualBox 3.2.0 with a Ubuntu 10.4 LTS guest running on a Windows 7 32bit host.

The system was originally installed as Ubuntu 9.10 and had two dynamic disks that were mounted to the SATA controller in VirtualBox 3.1.8. I then updated the Ubuntu installation to 10.4 and VirtualBox to 3.2.0 and now it will only boot the guest if the drives are connected to IDE controllers not the SATA controller. When they are connected to the SATA controller Grub complains that it can't find the root partition by UUID.

I thought there was some info on the boards about how to convert a Linux guest from IDE to SATA but can't seem to find it again.

As I say, may just be me being dim and missing something obvious but any pointers in the right direction that will save me having to do a reinstall would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

A.

I moved and update from Ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04 and did not have this problem both on 32 and 64 bit. Windows host and Ubuntu host.
Normally you don't need to do anything you just switch it in the settings and Ubuntu sees this and reacts.
Look at your Gurb2 and see if you can post the information here so we can tell what might be happening. You did not edit grub did you?
You might also look at the settings and try toggling the use host I/O cache and see if that helps, but it really should not cause it to not see the root partition.

Irrespective of the setting of "Use I/O Host Cache" then I get the same result. After a while the following output:

Gave up waiting for root device. Common problems:0f106d71e58
...
ALERT! /dev/disk/by-uuid/f41d6290-6d4e-4b99-a01b-18a5ef5f85f5 does not exist. Dropping to a shell!

/boot/grub/menu.lst and /etc/fstab are attached.

Regards,

A.

This is an ubuntu bug.

Add ahci to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules then run
mkinitramfs -o /boot/initrd.img-`uname -r` `uname -r`
to regenerate your initrd. Cross fingers, reboot.

baf wrote:Add ahci to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules then run
mkinitramfs -o /boot/initrd.img-`uname -r` `uname -r`
to regenerate your initrd. Cross fingers, reboot.

Thanks for the suggestion but it hasn't improved the situation any.

uname -r returns "2.6.32-22-generic-pae" and the new /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-22-generic-pae file has been created but it is about 50% of the size of the initrd.img-2.6.32-22-generic and initrd.img-2.6.28-15-generic files that are also in the /boot directory.

A.