virtualbox.org

Hi,

I have Ubuntun system installed in the VirtualBox. It has been working fine for one year. And suddenly, it cannot be started. The error message is:
No bootable medium found! System halted.

I used the VDI file as the hard disk which is using STAT Controller. I tried to detach and attach the VDI, but the problem is still there.
I also tried to set the Boot Order to be "Hard Disk" only, the problem is still there.
I move the VDI to another host machine and attach is as hard disk in the VirtualBox on that machine, the same error.
And there is no snapshot for the system.

The VBox.log is in the attachment.

Does anyone know how to solve the problem?

The error means exactly what it says : the disk is not bootable.

If it was before, but is not anymore, something must have changed. Did you change something? did you install something? did you have a crash?
If absolutely nothing come to your mind, and it stopped working with the exact same config from one day to another, I would check your hard disk for bad sectors.

I see from the log that the primary hd in this VM is called "C:\vm\Ubuntu_11.0_Server_SVN - Copy.vdi". When, how and why was this copy made?

I also see that the VM folder is "'C:\Users\User03\VirtualBox VMs\svn-new-3'". A copy of a copy? And the VM is referring to a VDI located outside the VM folder, which is usually a bad sign, e.g. it's a sign of tampering by someone who doesn't really understand the folder structure.

I encountered a crash because of the host machine restart.
C:\vm\Ubuntu_11.0_Server_SVN - Copy.vdi is copied from Ubuntu_11.0_Server_SVN.vdi. They are exactly the same. Ubuntu_11.0_Server_SVN.vdi is not bootable, too.

I guess the hard disk have some bad sectors.

Do you know how to check the bad sectors?

If your VM was running at the time of the crash, it could simply be some corruption of the disk, in which case simply run a boot repair utility in the guest.
As for the bad sectors, you have about a million of them on Google. I don't have any on top of my mind, maybe mpack will.

noteirak:

Do you have any idea on how to run boot repair utility on Ubuntu?

I never had that chance so far. A lot on Windows tho, so easily breakable...
But I am sure someone on the forum can help you further, just wait for it.

A virtual disk can't have bad sectors. The host drive can have bad sectors (run a disk check on the host to check that) but I'm not sure how that would be propagated to the guest.

I doubt that "no bootable medium found" can be due to bad sectors. Corruption is possible (I assume the message actually means that the 0x55AA signature on sector 0 is not present) but IMHO unlikely. It would require that sector 0 is zapped but somehow the VDI header is untouched. That could only really happen if sector 0 was deliberately zapped inside the guest.

More likely IMHO is that the disk was never bootable, and that you were previously booting from a live CD in the original VM, and that in duplicating the VM you have failed to include the CD.

mpack:

I don't have any CD in the VM.

I downloaded the ubuntu boot repair to fix the problem, but failed.

I will try other boot repair tools.