Author Topic: VBOX does not start anymore  (Read 12580 times)

Andi B.

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VBOX does not start anymore
« on: November 12, 2015, 09:52:09 am »
After a crash of my eCS host system VBOX no longer starts. It displays the command lline window with
Code: [Select]
VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 1.6.1_OSE
(C) 2005-2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
All rights reserved.

Waiting for the remote session to open...
but nothing happens. Usually at this time it should start to load the save image.

VirtualBox.exe from command line does nothing too. It immediately returns without popuplog.os2 entry or any other trap message.

I even tried to read back the xml configuration in /home/default/.VirtualBox but does not help.

Any hint to get my saved sessions running again?

R.M. Klippstein

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Re: VBOX does not start anymore
« Reply #1 on: November 12, 2015, 03:59:09 pm »
Hi Andi B. Can you tell if you're x:/home/default/.virtualbox is still intact? It should contain a machines and a vdi directory. If these contain the the details of the virtual machines you were using, you might be able to just re-install vbox. At any rate before you do anything, back up x:/home/default/.virtualbox.

klipp

Andi B.

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Re: VBOX does not start anymore
« Reply #2 on: November 12, 2015, 05:37:56 pm »
There are no directories and I'm pretty sure there have never been. Only 3 files. See below. 'VirtualBox.xml.zuNeu' is a left over from a previous problem.
Code: [Select]
{0}[e:\home\default\.virtualbox] dir

 Volume in drive E is E_DataSSD3     Serial number is 065C:45C2
 Directory of  E:\home\default\.VirtualBox\*

 3.04.15  14.51         <DIR>      124   ____D  .
12.11.15  17.32         <DIR>      513   ____D  ..
17.10.10  12.52           1.075    124   _____  compreg.dat
 8.08.15  14.54          15.903    124   _____  VirtualBox.xml
19.11.12  21.05           6.999    124   _____  VirtualBox.xml.zuNeu
17.10.10  12.52          15.538    124   _____  xpti.dat
          39.515 bytes in 4 files and 2 dirs
          45.056 bytes allocated
   5.326.991.360 bytes (5.080MB) free

{0}[e:\home\default\.virtualbox]

There is another .xml on the drive where my hard disk images live in a directory named as the guest machine.
Code: [Select]
{0}[r:\w2k] dir

 Volume in drive R is VirtualMach    Serial number is 75C8:B5C0
 Directory of  R:\W2k\*

 5.08.15  18.09         <DIR>      124   ____D  .
 5.11.15  22.44         <DIR>        0   ____D  ..
 4.11.15  15.58         <DIR>      124   ____D  Logs
 4.11.15  16.06         <DIR>      124   ____D  Snapshots
 4.11.15  16.06          85.453      0   ___A_  W2k.xml
« Last Edit: November 12, 2015, 05:40:21 pm by Andi B. »

R.M. Klippstein

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Re: VBOX does not start anymore
« Reply #3 on: November 12, 2015, 06:40:34 pm »
You should have a VDI directory  that contains your VBox images. Do a scan of your Hard drive looking for *.vdi's You may have them installed somewhere else. Before you do anything you need to make certian you still have those .vdi files.

klipp

Andi B.

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Re: VBOX does not start anymore
« Reply #4 on: November 12, 2015, 08:21:58 pm »
The .vdis are on volume R:\. But VBOX saves some settings in %home% too. That is 'E:\home\default' in my case. I once discovered that the .vdis on R:\., the machine files (log, snapshots) in R:\<MachineName>\. and %home%\.VirtualBox have to match.

Unfortunately my full backup of all these files is rather old :(

R.M. Klippstein

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Re: VBOX does not start anymore
« Reply #5 on: November 12, 2015, 09:02:34 pm »
WoW! Its getting complicated! Here's what you might try, Don't delete anything anywhere! But do a new install in the drive you are trying to use, but do the install in a different directory on that drive. I believe the new install will encounter and use the vdi's from the drive they are installed currently on. At any event, FIRST, make sure you have those backed up somewhere safe, you might need to copy them to the home directory (x:/home/default/.virtualbox/VDI) of the drive you are working on.

klipp

R.M. Klippstein

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Re: VBOX does not start anymore
« Reply #6 on: November 12, 2015, 11:54:26 pm »
Hey Andi, You should also be able to enable any valid .vdi file by opening virtualbox and opening "File" and then opening the Virtual Disk Manager and  clicking on add and then telling it where the .vdi file is located. This works for me when I have .vdi files on other partitions.
Hope you're making progress.

klipp

Andi B.

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Re: VBOX does not start anymore
« Reply #7 on: November 22, 2015, 11:08:27 am »
I think the problem was an incomplete MMOS2 installation. I tried to install new uniaud but the installation went wrong. After repairing MMOS2 VirtualBox.exe starts. Unfortunately all my VBOX backups of the last year did not work - defect snapshot files, missing proper .xml files, missing matching \home\default\.V... files, wrong UUID.... So I had to go back to a state older than year. This all to remind you how important A WORKING FULL SET OF ALL FILES (including your boot drive) is.

Luckily I store all my work even that one I make in VBOX and VPC on my eCS/JFS data partition which I regularly back up. Installed applications in VBOX can be reinstalled although it was a lot of work. But loosing my work would have been catastrophic. 

Btw. at the same time my main backup external USB drive was not accessible anymore. After a hard crash of eCS the JFS boot sector was destroyed. With the help of Jan an DFSee I could repair this problem. But it clearly showed to me more than one external backup drives are needed.

ivan

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Re: VBOX does not start anymore
« Reply #8 on: November 22, 2015, 05:06:22 pm »
Quote
But it clearly showed to me more than one external backup drives are needed.

And that Andi needs to be said loudly and often.

Many years ago I started a backup strategy for my company that required three VERIFIED backups of everything on our servers and workstations.  Every day at the end of the working day an incremental backup is made, at the end of the week a full backup is made and we keep three copies of that, two in house and one off site.  All of those are verified by using them to restore at least two of our test machines.

So far we have only 'lost' one document in 20 years and that was on a floppy disk.  We have had a few hard disks go bad on us both in the NAS boxes and workstations.  Restoring the NAS boxes are easy, unplug the dead drive, plug in the replacement and let the RAID 2 array rebuild.  Workstations are a little more difficult - you have to open them to replace the drive and, usually, restore the boot partition from an image for that station and then restore over the network.

Might I suggest that you consider getting a 2 drive NAS box for your backups.  Set it up as RAID 1 and use it on your network to allow background backups.
 

Andi B.

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Re: VBOX does not start anymore
« Reply #9 on: November 23, 2015, 10:07:17 am »
NAS would be an option although I usually like to circumvent additional complexity. For a home user managing additional boxes with other OSes and there quirks means lot of additional work.

Anyway I currently test in that direction - means measure transfer speed to other boxes with Samba. But sadly until now I only get terrible low performance with samba.

FTP is fast with few large files but slow with lot of small ones. OS/2 netbios in general is very fast but lacks large file support beside the interoperability problems other OSes. So no good solution found until now.

Most important point of my findings with VBOX is, although I have my data, vbox images and programs on different partitions the OS boot drive (MMOS2) prevented VBOX to start without any error message. In my case 4 volumes were involved. Additional problem was, VBOX can not be easily transfered to other machine as all you get is wrong 'CPUID'. At least I didn't find a way until now.

Doug Bissett

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Re: VBOX does not start anymore
« Reply #10 on: November 23, 2015, 07:59:39 pm »
Quote
NAS would be an option although I usually like to circumvent additional complexity. For a home user managing additional boxes with other OSes and there quirks means lot of additional work.

Always reduce complexity, whenever possible. NAS and RAID are not suitable for home systems, where there is not an IT person available to make sure they keep running properly. If you do use RAID, the only one that makes any sense, at all, is RAID 1 (mirror), but that is likely to cause more problems than it prevents. Note that RAID is NOT a backup scheme, although many people seem to think that it is.

Having said that, I built my own eCS 2.1 based NAS box, It works great, and I do know how to run eCS.   :)

Quote
I only get terrible low performance with samba.

If you have the right combination, SAMBA works okay. The problems seem to be in EVFSGUI (not sure about Netdrive), not in the SAMBA server. I use the SAMBA server (running under under eCS) with windows, and it is rock solid, and fast. I can't say that about using The SAMBA server, or Windows 7, with EVFSGUI.

I do use RSYNC for eCS backups to a local hard disk, a local USB connected hard disk, or a 1 GB LAN connection (my home made NAS), with wonderful performance, and results. I have been considering using a USB disk to emulate RAID 1 on the home made NAS, but I haven't got around to that, yet. It might work better if I just used a second hard disk, but the box doesn't have room for that.

Quote
VBOX can not be easily transfered to other machine as all you get is wrong 'CPUID'. At least I didn't find a way until now.

VERY EASY. Open VBox, do File-> Export Appliance, select what you want to export, and do it. Transfer the results to the new VBox host (any platform that has a reasonably close version of VBox), open VBox and do File-> Import Appliance. When it is finished, you have your system transferred. You probably do need to tweak a few things, like machine names (so there are not duplicates), but the appliance thing does change the CPUID and MAC address for you (read up on it in the help).

Corrected RAID level. It should be 1, not 2.
« Last Edit: November 24, 2015, 05:44:02 pm by Doug Bissett »

Andi B.

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Re: VBOX does not start anymore
« Reply #11 on: November 23, 2015, 08:07:27 pm »
Quote
VERY EASY. Open VBox, do File-> Export Appliance, select what you want to export, ...
In our 1.6.1 version? I do not see anything which looks similar in my German File menu. Or do you mean actual VBOX for other hosts than eCS?

ivan

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Re: VBOX does not start anymore
« Reply #12 on: November 23, 2015, 08:55:15 pm »
Doug,

RAID 1 is the array that is just a standard mirror of the disks.

RAID 2 is a very strange form of mirroring that can use more than 2 disks in the array BUT is uses an odd system for error correction and requires the disks to rotate in sync.

With RAID 1 if one disk goes down the remaining disk still has all data available until such time that the array is rebuilt. 

With RAID 2 if one disk goes down your data is unavailable until the array is rebuilt.  With newer drives that have internal error correction and the need for the drives to rotate in sync it is no longer in general use (there may be an old mainframe still running that uses it but most of them went to RAID 1 or RAID 5.

RAID 0 should be used ONLY if the data is non critical and you have a backup - the array does appear as the total of both disks capacity.  If a disk in a RAID 0 goes down then ALL the data is lost.
 

Doug Bissett

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Re: VBOX does not start anymore
« Reply #13 on: November 24, 2015, 05:41:01 pm »
Quote
RAID 1 is the array that is just a standard mirror of the disks.

OOPS! yes, that should have been RAID 1, not RAID 2. I cut off the offending finger.  :(

Those who are considering using RAID should review the information at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels.

Quote
Or do you mean actual VBOX for other hosts than eCS?

Actually, I never tried in the ancient OS/2 version of VBox (I do have it installed, and I do use it). All other platforms, that I have looked at (Windows, Linux) have the feature, but VBox is much newer. With the ancient 1.6.1 version you need to take the matching XML file with it, and you may need to edit that file to change a few things (but I never tried that).