Ubuntu having I/O errors on Mountain Lion

[WesleydeSouza]

I use VirtualBox to run Ubuntu Server inside an iMac 12,1 (Mid 2011). I leave the machine on, but with the display locked (Ctrl+Shift+Eject), so the machine doesn't go to sleep.

This worked perfectly, until today when I upgraded to Mountain Lion. Now, when I lock the display, the guest machine goes into kernel panic, suggesting a lot of I/O errors on the main hard drive. I try to powew off the machine by quitting VirtualBox but the window stops responding, and I'm forced to force quit VirtualBox VM.

I have already checked the host hard drive in Disk Utility, and ran fsck on the main guest hard drive. Both are free of errors.

Everyting involved is up-to-date.

What should I do?

[Perryg]

From what I read here (and you could search for it too) you probably need to uninstall VirtualBox and install it again.
Guests are unaffected if you use the VirtualBox uninstaller. Of course you have backups anyway, right?

[WesleydeSouza]

I reinstalled VirtualBox, luckly didn't have to use the backup.

It didn't give another kernel panic until now, but I found a potential configuration problem on my iMac: it was set to logout the user after 60 minutes of inactivity.

After it tried to logout the user, VirtualBox VM stopped responding, I had to force quit it.

Hope it's resolved, otherwise I'll update this thread.

[Perryg]

Logging out is pretty much like pulling the plug on VirtualBox unless you know of some way to keep it running under the same user without that user being logged in. There is a thread here somewhere about running VirtualBox as a service under Mac, but I don't have the link.

[WesleydeSouza]

It did not work, after reinstalling and making sure every configuration on the Mac is set to not put the hard drives to sleep and not log me out after an idle time, I'm still having I/O errors:

i.imgur DOT com/HiqDF.png
(I'm a member for less than a day, the forum does not allow me to post links)

Additionally, when I try to quit VirtualBox VM, it freezes before giving me options and I must force quit it.

How can I diagnose what is going on?

[Perryg]

Is the guest stored on an external drive?
Post the guests log file (as an attachment) here.

[WesleydeSouza]

The guest is on the main hard drive, but the backup disk is mounted on an external hard drive. It has been like this for a long time on Snow Leopard and Lion.

The log is attached.

[Perryg]

Correction, this has worked until you upgraded to Lion.

Few things to try and if they do not help you will need to post a ticket to bugtracker

• 1) to eliminate the external drive, temporarily disable the backup drive in the guest.
  2) try with host io/cache enabled in the guest settings -> storage and see if that stops the errors.

If either of these help I think you probably still need to post a ticket but the tests will also give the DEVs something to look at.

[WesleydeSouza]

No, it was working on Lion until I upgraded to Mountain Lion.

[Perryg]

No, it was working on Lion until I upgraded to Mountain Lion.

So it was upgraded. That changes the dynamics.