VM boot hung after upgrade to Centos 6.4

[vdovy]

Windows 64-bit host / Centos 6.3 VM upgraded to 6.4

After completing an upgrade of VirtualBox I ran Software Upgrades from within the CentOS 6.3 VM. Everything was running fine from within the VM and I did a clean power down. The Software Upgrade appears to have upgraded my VM to 6.4 based on the progress bar. When I request the VM to start now, the progress bar appears and after going to 100% the screen is left black with a non-blinking cursor in the upper left. I don't see any obvious errors in the VBox log (attached.)

[mpack]

00:00:15.535602 Host RAM: 8072MB total, 5199MB available
...
00:00:15.604424 RamSize <integer> = 0x0000000141f00000 (5 401 214 976, 5 GB)
...
00:00:15.604795 VRamSize <integer> = 0x0000000000c00000 (12 582 912, 12 MB)

You don't have enough available RAM to run a 5GB guest. I would recommend reducing to 2GB.

It's also good practice to eject the VBoxGuestAdditions CD from the virtual CD drive.

I'm also not seeing any clear evidence that there's a bootable HD connected to this VM. Are you sure you weren't using a live CD? It's a common mistake for Linux newbies: they think they have a working Linux guest (especially if they have a habit of suspending VMs instead of shutting them down): until such time as they put another disk in the CD drive... (like the GAs). Attempting to update the guest OS version would also be problematic!

[Perryg]

Easy to miss with the new logging but the drive is booting

Code: Select all

00:00:18.339194 Guest Log: BIOS: Booting from Hard Disk...

There was an issue when updating to 6.4 though and it had to do with the VBox Additions not being upgraded when the new kernel was installed. Having installed DKMS should have prevented this but IIRC DKMS is not in the CentOS repo just like it is not in the RedHat repo. You would have had to install it from rpmfusion.

Anyway the fix is easy enough. At boot you need to get to a tty windows and manually run the guest additions setup. (See note 1 below)

Code: Select all

# /etc/init.d/vboxadd setup

If that fails then you would need to install the guest additions again from the same tty

Note 1: see CentOS for instructions on how to get to a tty at boot
Note 2: you may need to update the kernel-headers & kernel-devel package as well.
Note 3: Also what Don said about your memory. You should reduce it to prevent swapping which can cripple the guest.