virtualbox.org

Previously operational Red Hat 6.3 servers in Virtual Box.

When systems boot, they all go to their Red Hat GUI.

At that point, keyboard and mouse freeze up and cannot login. Cannot
move mouse with arrow keys on keyboard nor mouse on screen to select
a user nor <Return> to choose.

Changing to single-user through grub or setting /etc/inittab to run level 5
gives aok results, but no gui. Okay to login. No messages in /var/log/messages.

Have seen this happen in Virtual Box now with one Red Hat 5 VM and two
Red Hat 6 VM's.

Has anyone else seen the above?

Has anyone else seen this?

By "previously operational" you mean that the previously worked in VirtualBox right? Are you aware of anything at all which changed between their working and not-working states?

Also, please post the VM log file, as a compressed attachment please.

mpack wrote:By "previously operational" you mean that the previously worked in VirtualBox right? Are you aware of anything at all which changed between their working and not-working states?

Also, please post the VM log file, as a compressed attachment please.

No changes made to VB, RH, Mac OS X.

It was all operating aok on both Lion and Mountain Lion but happens rarely and when
it happens, it appears to prevent all typein to the guy in the VM inside the VB. One can
set the VM OS to boot without the GUI and one can work GUIless but my work requires
access to the browser and a website provided on one of the VM's for testing. So my
only alternative (to a fix) is to rebuild the OS from scratch and regularly snapshot it.

Log is posted below.

I plan to create new VM's and snapshot or clone them from time to time while working
so that there is an operational version despite this bug. Since it happened in three VM's
with two different Red Hat releases, I think it is VB related not RH related.

To re-visit: the mouse is disappearing when clicking inside the VM. The OS external is:
Mountain Lion (Mac OS X 10.), latest patches (none since release a few days ago.)
The OS in the VM is Red Hat 6.3 but also Red Hat 5 had the problem.

All of this occurred also on Lion final patch as well.

The version of VirtualBox is 4.1.18 r78361.



Stuart

Log Attached

I have rebuilt my VM's from scratch and will use VirtualBox snapshots/cloning to keep backups.

I had no idea VirtualBox could damage the GUI and/or make it unable to be logged into.

If I see this happening again in a way that the backups cannot recover from, I will switch to
Parallelz or VMWare Fusion for Mountain Lion on the MacBook Air and abandon VirtualBox as
an unstable and flawed platform.

smcracraft@me.com wrote:If I see this happening again in a way that the backups cannot recover from ...

I would have more confidence if you hadn't mentioned snapshots and backups in the same breath: snapshots are not useful as backups.

I do not understand why people equate snapshots to backups.
They have different purposes.

That article is not discussing snapshots as virtualbox takes.
A mango is not a tangerine.