virtualbox.org

Hello,

I'm trying to install a guest OS of Debian on a host OS of Windows 7. The host is 64 bit, but has no hardware virtualization support (it's an Intel Pentium B950). Due to the lack of HW virtualization support, I only get options for 32bit guest OSes. So I downloaded the Debian-i386 ISO for the install.

Everything appears to work - the machine boots and the Debian install starts. I'm using the default settings of the installer, with the recommended 8GB .vdi file, and I've tried the dynamically expanding file and the static size of 8GB, with the same error. That occurs at the point when the partitioner is at the end of its business, when it fails with "The attempt to mount a filesystem with type ext4 in SCSI1 (0,0,0), partition #1 (sda) at / failed."

Could anyone shed any light on this - or offer some way to diagnose the problem better?

TIA,

wpb

Hard to say with your limited amount of information, but what you have described so far it would have nothing to do with VirtualBox. Especially since you say you used the default settings.

Thanks for the reply - I'll gladly provide more information, but I'm not sure what would be relevant, and what would just be noise. My knowledge of VMs and Linux is very limited.

The only thing that I can think of that would concern VirtualBox would be if the host has enough free space to be able to create the drive. Nothing I can think of would cause your issue other than the guest or end user. Maybe the guests log file as an attachment would shed more light.

I managed to circumvent the problem by using the stable image of Wheezy instead of the testing image. I'm not sure if I had a corrupt image at first, or if the testing image is broken in some way, but it appears to be installing packages now. Thank you very much for your advice.

wpb wrote:The attempt to mount a filesystem with type ext4 in SCSI1 (0,0,0), partition #1 (sda) at / failed.

It isn't clear to me what version of Debian is being installed, but taking the error message at face value, I'd guess it's saying that sda has not yet been partitioned and/or formatted. I'd guess that the expectation of an ext4 filesystem is from grub.

Perry, is the mention of SCSI1 normal for Linux? I.e. does it wrap all hdd accesses in a SCSI layer?

While I don't know if they (linux) wrap the container in a layer I do know they call it scsi. Then they call if ata or pata. It's just one of lifes little mystery for me i guess. Never needed to know just that it was the way they labeled it.
I just checked on metal and they call pata scsi as well.

SCSI interfaces don't crop up a lot in embedded work, so I don't know either. I have a vague recollection that most modern disk interface architectures support the SCSI APIs even though though the underlying hardware infrastructure is different. That's what could be happening here... or the VM might actually be looking for an LSILogic or BusLogic SCSI controller, and then I'd have to wonder why.

I think they (linux) use scsi as just a name. Here is a quick search
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Partition-Mas ... O/x99.html