SOLVED why do I get a black screen when trying to start a vm

Post by **stephanecharette** » 7. Sep 2008, 09:34

Things were good in the previous version of VB from late July (or whenever that was).

Today I upgraded to VB 2.0 hoping to use 64-bit guests. But VM wont boot. Just sits at a black screen after the Sun VB logo screen. The cursor blinks at the top-left corner. I'm trying to boot the installation iso debian-40f4a-ia64-netinst.iso, in case anyone else is running into this problem.

Machine log always ends with the same message, no matter how long I wait:
00:00:22.510 Guest Log: BIOS: Booting from CD-ROM...

Some BIOS notes:
Machine is Intel Quad Core 2 2.4GHz
64-bit: Intel EM64T
Speed step: On
Virtualization: On
Dell DXP061, bios 2.5.0 (05/24/07)

Host is Ubuntu 8.04-64bit, running virtualbox-2.0 (2.0.0-36011_Ubuntu_hardy).

I did notice that it didn't seem to correctly remove the previous version of VirtualBox. When I run "dpkg -l | grep VirtualBox", I see "VirtualBox 1.6.4-33808_Ubuntu_hardy" in addition to v2. Is this normal, or is this a possible cause?

Stéphane Charette
stephanecharette@gmail.com

Andrew_wojownik · Post by **Andrew_wojownik** » 7. Sep 2008, 10:32

Try off virtualization.

Post by **stephanecharette** » 7. Sep 2008, 11:37

Andrew_wojownik wrote:Try off virtualization.

No difference. Still stuck at the same place. Log file still has same message.

Stéphane

Post by **Sasquatch** » 7. Sep 2008, 20:18

For the proper upgrade and reason for the listing of VB 1.6.4, see the VirtualBox FAQ about the upgrade.

For your other issue, does your motherbord support Virtualisation. Read the manual (or help file) to learn what you need for 64 bit guests to function properly.
Also, is the ISO really for a generic 64 bit processor, or the Intel Itanium family? If I would logically make some sense of the name, ia64 may mean Itanium as I've seen that form for Windows Server editions.

Post by **stephanecharette** » 7. Sep 2008, 23:07

Sasquatch wrote:For your other issue, does your motherbord support Virtualisation. Read the manual (or help file) to learn what you need for 64 bit guests to function properly.

Yes, I read the manual. My bios has a setting simply called "Virtualization" which can be enabled/disabled. At the moment, it is enabled. Problem is, calling something "Virtualization" is somewhat vague to say the least. Not VB's fault, but nevertheless still difficult to debug.

Also, is the ISO really for a generic 64 bit processor, or the Intel Itanium family? If I would logically make some sense of the name, ia64 may mean Itanium as I've seen that form for Windows Server editions.

This may be what saves the day. I went back to cdimage.debian.org and saw there is indeed another ISO called "debian-40r4a-amd64-netinst.iso". It is downloading now. Hopefully this is the cause of the hang I was experiencing. Will update this post once it finished downloading.

Stéphane

Post by **stephanecharette** » 7. Sep 2008, 23:34

stephanecharette wrote:
Sasquatch wrote:Also, is the ISO really for a generic 64 bit processor, or the Intel Itanium family? If I would logically make some sense of the name, ia64 may mean Itanium as I've seen that form for Windows Server editions.
This may be what saves the day. I went back to cdimage.debian.org and saw there is indeed another ISO called "debian-40r4a-amd64-netinst.iso".

That was indeed the problem. The vm booted just fine with the "amd64" image, and I'm partway through the installation already.

Thanks.

Stéphane Charette