torstai 14. huhtikuuta 2011

VirtualBox: "FATAL: Could not read from the boot medium! System halted."

I've been configuring test cluster on VirtualBox using Puppet and Cobbler.  The goal is to have a internal network inside the VirtualBox without having any direct connection from the slaves to the external network. I have one machine that will run cobblerd and puppet ("master") while other machines connect to it.

Everything went on pretty smoothly, until I tried to boot up my first slave using PXE. Then I got the error message on the console of the new virtual machine:
FATAL: Could not read from the boot medium! System halted.

It seemed that the new virtual machine didn't even try make a connection to the dhcpd -server running on master. In PXE -boot, first thing that the client does is getting ip -address from the dhcpd -server. But nothing happened.

After two or three hours of testing and checking configuration files, in a moment of desperation, I tried to change the type of the network card from "Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop" to "PCnet-FAST III (Am79C973)" and everything started to work. Wicked.

Hopefully this will help someone :)

edit:
There seems to be a bug report for this already.

6 kommenttia :

  1. Make sure to install the Virtualbox extension pack and then you can use the Intel one. I didn't manage to get it working without the Intel care, because I wanted 64 bit.
    http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/virtualbox/downloads/index.html#extpack

    VastaaPoista
  2. Jyrki, you're a lifesaver! I struggled with the same issue today.
    I wouldn't have thought they kept some of the boot ROMs in an
    "extension pack". WTF.

    Thank you!

    VastaaPoista
  3. Thanks! Extension pack fixed my problem:
    when I trusted to boot via PXE from WDS server, was error after recieving the IP from DHCP. Error: No filename
    Fatal: could not read from the boot medium!...
    Thanks a lot!

    VastaaPoista
  4. Thank you. Worked like a magic for me.

    VastaaPoista