virtualbox.org

Hi everyone,
I'm trying to install Ubuntu as guest on my Snow Leopard iMac host with VB 3.2.10, but in the middle of installation process the hard drive of my mac stops working (I can hear the shutdown of the hard-drive) and obviously all the system crash. I've tried the installation process many times trying enable/disable IO APIC and PAE/NX and all times it crashes, but not at the same step of the installation procedure.

At the last row of the VM log file there is this message:
"AIOMgr: Host limits number of active IO requests to 16. Expect a performance impact."

Any suggestions to resolve the problem?

Run diagnostics on your hard drive. Sounds like it's about to fail. I've had a hard drive shut down in the middle of work before, even during boot and checking on it's status, it was about to fail. This was my main OS drive and didn't host any VM, so I know for sure that it's not a VB problem. But certain amounts of I/O may cause a failing hard drive to unexpectedly park and shut down, only to wake up some time later (can be a minute, can be half an hour or more).
So backup your data and check the health of the drive.

Thanks for the reply Sasquatch
The hard drive about to fail is also my fear; I checked the status of the hard drive with Disk Utility and Onyx but seems to be all ok (anyway I made a backup for safety). Since now the shut down of the hard drive happens only during the installation process of a guest system on the virtual machine: I've tried to install also Opensuse, and it fails in the same manner.
On my Mac I have installed also Parallels to run my bootcamp partition, could this create a conflict with VB or a overload on the system also if Parallels is not running while I use VB?

The two programs shouldn't conflict when they aren't running at the same time. Do check if parallels has any modules loaded that might get in the way.

My own hard drive didn't show any S.M.A.R.T. errors either, yet it was definitely failing. I ran multiple checks, several different ones and they weren't conclusive as to say it was failing or not. It was already so strange that when my other IDE drive was attached, a quick check would say failed, while it would pass when it was disconnected. This was even way before the drive eventually failed for real or showed signs of failing.

I found two modules that Parallels loads also if not running: prl_disp_service and prl_natpd.
I stopped them and retried an installation, but nothing change.
At this point I think that this is really an hard drive problem not detected by the Disk Utility.
Thanks for the help Sasquatch

Since the problem occurs when you're installing a Guest OS, which when a lot of disk activity is generated, you might get a similar response if you generate lots of I/O in another way.

Babux,

My OSX crash experience seems quite similar to yours. It might be worth reading my thread to see if my solution helps you:
http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic. ... 38&start=0