Virtualbox No Bootable Medium Found Mac

Posted on 01-05-2021 by admin

Another case when you can get the No bootable medium found in VirtualBox fatal error is when a virtual optical drive with a higher boot order contains the unbootable media. The disk drive that contains the correct boot image has the lower boot priority, and is disabled. Song: Beat Your Competition - Vibe TracksVirtualBox Site: download: http://download.virtualbox.org/vi. VirtualBox doesn’t point to an operating system, either a mounted iso or a virtual hard disk with a bootable OS. When you create a virtual machine for a first time, you need to mount a bootable iso like Ubuntu. If you mount a bootable iso before you start your virtual machine, you will be successful booting up the system.

No Bootable Medium Found System Halted Virtualbox Mac Os X
No Bootable Device Found Oracle Vm
Virtualbox No Bootable Media Found Reddit
Oracle Vm Virtualbox No Bootable Medium Found
Virtualbox No Bootable Medium Found Mac

I used VirtualBox to create a bootable USB key with FreeBSD using VirtualBox on my Mac.

Virtualbox no bootable medium found mac os

1Booting from a IMG in Virtual Box
2Issues

Either make the bootable disk the 'IDE Primary Master', or immediately after booting press F12 and select the boot disk. Otherwise, Virtual Box will try to boot from the (still empty) default disk, and you get the error 'FATAL: No bootable medium found!

Booting from a IMG in Virtual Box

FreeBSD is distributed as a IMG file, which is a normal format for USB disks. It is not possible to tell Virtual Box you want to boot from a USB disk. So you either have to tell Virtual Box it is a floppy, regular hard disk, or CD. While it should not matter (you have a file which contains a bootable system), in practise I only got it to work using a bootable hard disk.

The IMG files distributed by FreeBSD contain a raw UFS file system; raw meaning without overhead (metadata), compression or partition schema. This is unlike ISO distributions, which do contain a partition table (even though their content is also not compressed).

Hard disk booting

In order to tell Virtual Box that the file is a hard disk, you must first convert the IMG file to a VDI file. VDI is the native Virtual Box disk format.

(VBoxManage is a tool installed by VirtualBox. Usually, Virtual Box creates an alias from /usr/bin/VBoxManage to /Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS/VBoxManage.)

In the storage settings, select the IDE controller, and 'add hard disk' using the buttons at the bottom of the screen. 'Choose existing disk' and select the vdi disk image.

Floppy booting

In the storage settings, there is by default only a IDE controller. You first need to 'Add Floppy Controller' with on of the small buttons at the bottom of the screen. Now use the disk icon to add a new floppy. You will be asked: 'You are about to add a new floppy drive to controller Floppy Controller. Would you ike to choose a virtual floppy to put in the drive or to leave it empty for now?' Select 'Choose disk' and select the appropriate IMG file.

If you get an error 'Could not get the storage format of the medium 'FreeBSD-9.0-RELEASE-memstick.img' (VERR_NOT_SUPPORTED)', Virtual Box can't read the IMG file. In that case, choose one of the other methods (hard disk booting or CD booting).

It seems that the IMG files distributed by FreeBSD are not suitable (perhaps Virtual Box expects an image with a partition table? I tried converting with hdiutils convert but to no avail.)

CD booting

In order to tell Virtual Box that the file is a CD, you must first convert the IMG file to a ISO file. ISO 9660 is a common CD disk format.

To convert the raw disk image to ISO, run:

(Similarly, use hdiutil with -format UDRW to convert from IMG or ISO to DMG (actually: UDIF read/write image) which can be used with dd. Use -format UDZO for zlib compressed DMG files. For IMG there seems less conventions, but you may want to try -format RdWr to convert to a NDIF read/write image).

Unfortunately, this does not seem to create a partition. If I try to boot from this newly created image, Virtual Box gives an error 'FATAL: No bootable medium found! System halted.'. hdutils imageinfo lists 'partition-scheme: none', while it should have been 'partition-scheme: ISO9660'.

I expected the following command to create the partition:

Unfortunately, this gives an error hdiutil: makehybrid: attach of disk image failed: 111. So it seems I'm at loss about the details of these file formats and how to deal with them. I gave up (Suggestion as how to fix this are most welcome!)

Issues

Here are a few issues I ran into.

USB2 is not supported by VirtualBox

VirtualBox does not support USB2 by default. If you try to mount a USB device, you will get a warning that it requires 'Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack'. Download from the VirtualBox website and install extension pack by simply dragging it to the VirtualBox application.

Failed to attach the USB device

Problem:

Solution:In the USB settings of the VM, changed from the USB 2.0 (EHCI) controller to the USB 2.0 (xHCI) controller.

Determine the mount location of the disk

The mount location of the USB disk is determined by your operating system and presently available hardware. The names typically take these forms:

/dev/da0 on FreeBSD
/dev/disk2 on Mac OS X
/dev/sda1 on Linux

If the USB key is already mounted, these tools list the mounted disks:

mount on Linux and FreeBSD
diskutil list on Mac OS X

Mac does not fully unmount USB stick

Problem: Ejecting a disk in the Finder only ejects the partition, but does not unmount the whole disk.

Solution: determine the disk, and unmount using diskutil:

No USB devices found

Deattach USB disk from host computer, and attach to to Virtual Box.

No Bootable Medium Found System Halted Virtualbox Mac Os X

Problem: Installer shows up, but I can't select a USB disk. Even after rescanning, and checking the fixit menu, it gaves an error 'No USB devices found'.

Solution: It seems that VirtualBox has some limitations when it comes to accessing USB devices with the guest OS. I wanted a bootable USB disk with some modifications. In the end, I simply copied the default memstick distribution to a USB disk using dd (not using VirtualBox), than booted a installed FreeBSD on virtual disk (instead of USB disk) in Virtual Box, and mounted the USB disk in that guest OS to make the desired changes. (I probably could have used a 'Live CD' in Virtual Box as well)

No Bootable Device Found Oracle Vm

USB_ERR_TIMEOUT

Virtualbox No Bootable Media Found Reddit

Booted FreeBSD in VirtualBox, and attached USB disk. Error:

Seems a bug in VirtualBox. See issue #8182

Oracle Vm Virtualbox No Bootable Medium Found

In VirtualBox settings (under ports > USB) Disable USB 2.0 (EHCI) Controller.

Reboot the Virtual box.