I use VMware on a Vista machine and had successfully installed openSUSE (64bit).
However I tried out the Virtual Box VM and tried to boot the SUSE image. It didn’t work (complained about x window). The problem now is that if I try to load SUSE from VMware, it simply stops at the grub bootloader. I can enter 'grub’commands, but I have no idea idea how to boot my OS anymore.
Any ideas if it will be possible to load my SUSE again without a clean install?
BR /// Rob
On Fri, 30 Jan 2009 09:26:02 +0000, bmwrob wrote:
> Any ideas if it will be possible to load my SUSE again without a clean
> install?
I would start with the Novell TID #3447847, Troubleshooting Common Boot
Issues. If you can’t find a resolution there, try booting from the
openSUSE 11.1 ISO and choosing Repair System | Automatic Repair.
If neither of these restore the system to a bootable state, you may have
to reinstall, but if you’ve partitioned out /home, then you won’t lose
any data (as long as you don’t format that partition).
HTH!
–
Randy Goddard
“It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.”
If I understand you correctly, you created a VMware virtual machine with a virtual disk on which you installed openSUSE, and then installed VirtualBox and tried to use the VMware virtual disk in it? VirtualBox did not work for you, and when you attempted to access the virtual disk again in the VMware virtual machine, you encountered the boot problem?
IIRC VMware uses a .vmk file while VirtualBox native file type is .vdi but it supports .vmk. Except that the .vmk files don’t play nice together from both virtual machines. Each virtual machine app has its own “bios”, as it does its own hardware abstraction layer. When you used the file in VBox, something appears to have been changed in the virtual partition table, virtual disk geometries, or the virtual boot sector on the virtual root partition.
Long story short, treat this as if it were a real hard disk problem. If at boot you are taken into what appears like the grub shell, that means that grub stage1 in the virtual MBR successfully called grub stage2 in the virtual root partition boot sector, but that stage2 cannot properly read its partition. So, try this at the grub prompt:
find /boot/vmlinuz
If grub returns a partition identifier, for example (hd0,1), then try this:
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda2
initrd /boot/initrd
boot
Be sure that in the root line the (hd0,1) is what the find command actually returned (as opposed to just the example above), and that on the kernel line the root= clause uses the correct partition number (again, as opposed to my example using sda2). If that works, the vm will boot and once in you can navigate to /boot/grub/menu.lst and make sure that file is correct.
Forgot to include - if the above gets you in, you’ll need to reinstall grub via YaST Boot Loader or via the grub shell.
thanks for the suggestion! You are right in your assumptions, that was exactly what happened.
Unfortunately the “find” gave Error 15 (file not found).
I did manage to get the Virtual Box partly up and running. It do get the error “failed to start x server”, but at list I can login from a command line interface.
I don’t know what would be the easiest restore method. trying to get Virtual box up and running or trying to restore the original VMware image.
BR /// Rob
Perhaps there is more than one problem here. If you got in far enough to fail on starting the X server, that means the OS booted. Failing to start X - did you install the VBox Guest Additions, the vbox graphics driver (do “cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf” and look for the driver name in the Device Section).