virtualbox.org

I've been struggling with this for 2 weeks, and unfortunately couldn't find any other topic which could help me.

My host is a windows 7 64bits, used VBox version 4 without a glitch until I decided to upgrade to Vbox 5.0.12

When I upgraded, I had a problem with the vbox driver, which led me to reinstall my host completely from scratch. (the driver could not be installed; I downgraded to vbox V4, which damaged ny host OS in the uninstall process and I finally reformatted it - so, I'm really afraid of downgrading again)

In the new host (Windows 7 64 bits) I managed to install Virtualbox 5.0.14, but my guests had problemms to and I decided to recreate the guest and upgrade the system from Debian 6 to 8.

I use the guest as a development machine for my PHP sites, and avoiding errors on the production server - that's why I'm not using Apache and php on windows, I can't predict specific errors online using windows.

That said, here is my situation now:

My Debian system now boots with a long delay when trying to raise the ethernet interface, and when finally completes, in 90% of times it has no IPV4 IP.

• I already set the networking to use static and dynamic (via DHCP) addresses, none worked;

• When in DHCP mode, I created a rule in my router to set an static IP tp my MAC address. Worked only once;

Does anyone know why it happened? It's getting me nuts. (And my development work is stalled due to this problem).

Any help is welcome.

The VBox driver? I'm not sure what that is, but difficulties installing drivers usually just mean that you need elevated permissions, i.e. use "Run as administrator".

What version did you upgrade from?

Can we have precise error messages?

Hello. The driver I meant was VBoxDrv.sys which is in the directory C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\drivers\vboxdrv

When I first tried to upgrade this file could not be installed, thus the virtualbox could never be initiated. I fixed it by reinstalling Windows 7.

Yesterday I uninstalled the Virtualbox 5.0.14 version and reinstalled 4.3.36, then my debian guest could succesfully obtain the IPs needed (IPV4 and IPV6). I worked until bedtime, then turned off the PC. This morning, I got this error: and saying that the hard disk is already mounted.

I am trying to figure out why it happened and how to fix, yet. Any suggestions?

And thanks for the reply:)

You get that error when you never actually mounted the hard disk in the VM properly. I've seen people getting that error when they registered a hard disk by dragging and dropping a VDI file into the Virtual Media Manager. That is a legacy feature that the devs may have forgotten about. That is NOT how you register media permanently in VirtualBox since v4.0.0.

Since v4.0.0 the way to register pre-existing media is to select (right click) a controller in the Storage panel of the VM settings, and choose "Add hard disk". By "VM settings" I mean the settings panel for the VM which will have primary ownership of that media file.

Hi, mpack
Thanks for the pointer. I didn't drag the media, but actually opened the .vbox file from my 5.0.14 install after I reinstalled the 4.3.36.

The fix I found was to edite the .vbox file with notepad and removed the lines under the tags <StorageController name="SATA" ...> and <HardDisks>
Then I opened the vbox fila and reconfigured the hard disks appropriately.

I think everything is working now, at least5 I can access my development server after a reboot.

Thanks a lot for your information!

I think this topic can be closed, although the problem was not fixed in the latest virtualbox. Should I file it as a bug? (If so, how can I do it?)

Bugs should be reported on BugTracker, but I frankly don't think there's any point unless it's repeatable.