Precise Puppy 5.6 Won't Boot in a VirtualBox (Win7 64 Bit)

[Algol68]

Hi All,

It's my first posting on this site, so my apologies if this has already been reported, though nothing showed up in the searchesI did.

I'm running Virtualbox 4.2.12 on two different machines, both of which have Window 7 Ultimate (64 bit) as the host OS, but they show differing behaviours when trying to run Precise Puppy 5.6.1 (Barry Kauler's latest Linux).

1) HP XW6400 (dual Intel Xeon 5140 processors) - Fails to boot, halting on the step "Making Filesystem usable...", no error messaghe, the vm just hangs,
2) Custom built (AMD X4 640) - Boots normally

Incidentally Precise Puppy 5.5.93 fails on the HP, yet 5.4.90 works.

Has anyone got an inkling of what's going on?

[mpack]

Please pick one VM to discuss, and provide a log file for it. See Minimum information needed for assistance.

[Algol68]

Hi,

Thanks for replying so quickly. I've attached the log, as requested.

[mpack]

According to the log, you closed VM after running it for only 1min 46secs. Perhaps you should give it longer?

Also, does Puppy Linux really need 1GB RAM? That only leaves 700MB for your host.

[Algol68]

I doubt that having 700MB left for Win 7 should be an issue. Surely the VM has all the ram it needs? Anyway I will try again with a smaller allocation (512MB) & with fewer other applications running in Win 7.

The log I sent represented just one of at least 4 attempts to boot. One instance ran for 40+ minutes before I terminated it.

The other thing to note it that when I run the same thing on an AMD x4 640 pc the step completes almost instanteously with the output "depmod ... done" before moving onto the next step in the boot process. It successfully boots on that pc every time.

I have a suspicion that it's something to do with the Intel Xeon processor? Could that be the case?

Incidentally I've tried to boot with & without PAE, with all permutations of chipset, with different video modes, normal / 2D /3D. In all of these experiments the vm failed to boot on the HP machine.

[By the way, many thanks to you for taking the time to reply to this.]

[Algol68]

FYI. this failure to boot is also exhibited by a Win 7 Ultimate machine with an Intel Pentium 4 (HT) 3GHz. It runs previous versions of Puppy but fails to boot Precise Puppy 5.6.1 on the same step as the HP pc.

[mpack]

I don't see what relevance the Xeon CPU could have, except that yours doesn't support VT-x and hence you'll be unable to run a 64-bit guest.

Normally I would suspect that you've used the wrong VM recipe, e.g. not enabling IO-APIC, however I thought the whole point of Puppy Linux was that it runs on older, more limited hardware (hence why I asked if it needed 1GB).

[Algol68]

I would tend to agree with you. The CPU in the host shoildn't matter.

Incidentally i have made new vms, without altering any of the properties & i still get the same results.

Perhaps other people could verify whether my experience is a problem on their hardware too.

I.e. It works on an AMD x4 640 but fails on an Intel P4 & an Intel Xeon.

[Neron]

Hi,

I have the same problem on a Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.20GHz, Windows 7 SP1 32 Bit, with all "Puppy" derivatives I tried (precise-5.7.1, precise-5.7.1-retro, slacko-5.6-PAE, slacko-5.6-4G-NON-PAE and X-precise-2.0).

- Older versions did run...
- I think PAE or NO-PAE does not matter...
- IO APIC does not matter (enabled/disabled)...
- Enable EFI has to be disabled.
- Chipset EIIX3 or ICH9 does not matter...
- Memory on Guest does not matter (tried 256 to 1 GB)
- USB does not matter (enabled/disabled)...
- 32/64 Bit (Host/Guest) does not matter...

The last lines in the VBox.log are:

Code: Select all

00:00:17.760517 PATM: Disable block at c152fd76 - write c152fde8-c152fdec
00:00:17.762761 PATM: Disable block at c1535c16 - write c1535c55-c1535c59
00:00:17.764757 PATM: Disable block at c1549bd1 - write c1549c3b-c1549c3f
00:00:17.765444 PATM: Disable block at c154a1d9 - write c154a253-c154a257
00:00:17.769870 PATM: Disable block at c154e024 - write c154e084-c154e088

It would be great if we could solve this problem because I like the Puppy-Linux

Regards and have a nice day!

[stoneguy]

Or in Ubuntu64 AMD host and Precise 5.7.1 with both 32-bit regular and retro guests

System hangs after displaying
Making the filesystem usable...
After powering off the VM, log shows similar PATM disable block entries as above, followed by
Changing the VM state from RUNNING to SUSPENDED
AIOMgr: Flush failed with VERR_INVALID_PARAMETER
AIOMgr: Endpoint for file <vdi file> (flags 000c0781) created successfully
PDMR3Suspend

Earlier versions of puppy (<5.6) would pause at the "Making usable" display, then follow with a message regarding depmod, and continue to complete boot

[svnpenn]

This worked for me, sorry I cannot post URLs

superuser DOT com/questions/694471/stuck-on-making-the-filesystem-usable

[Ste2ph]

To no avail. :/. Had Guest set to 512 RAM, and as Ubuntu 32bit.. Then I tryed changing it to Linux 2.6 and still nothing.

This is what i get on Windows 7 64bit Host trying to install Guest OS Precise Puppy 5.7.1 right after the first screen

Puppy 5.png (14.8 KiB) Viewed 5001 times