Arch Linux

wucherpfennig

Member

From: Switzerland

Registered: 2013-06-02

Posts: 13

Stuck on boot after enabling Intel VT-d in Bios

Hi

I'm quite new with arch (suse/ubuntu/fedora before) and very happy that a finally moved to this great distro.But right now I'm struggling with virtualbox or better with enabling Intel VT on my lenovo w530. The boot process gets stuck at checking the filesystem for errors and nothing else happens. Since I never encountered such a problem any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

Last edited by wucherpfennig (2013-06-05 07:41:42)

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: Stuck on boot after enabling Intel VT-d in Bios

I think you need to boot the virtual machine with the archiso as the cdrom/boot device.  Then mount the filesystem, and either chroot into it (arch-chroot makes this super convenient) or use journalctl's -D option to get information about what is actually going on.  The post you have made is just waaaaayyyy too sparse on details for anyone to actually help you here.

wucherpfennig

Member

From: Switzerland

Registered: 2013-06-02

Posts: 13

Re: Stuck on boot after enabling Intel VT-d in Bios

sorry for my sluggishly written post.

well I'm running arch on my w530 which is just working like a charm. Since I need Windows for my studies I wanted to install virtualbox on my machine. During the installation I thought I could enable the Intel Intel Virtualization Technology to run windows even smoother on my arch. But after I enabled  them in the bios, arch won't start anymore. It gets stuck at boot time around the point when checking for filesystem errors. Since there's no further output to drill down the problem the only way to start the laptop is to reset the vt option in the bios and restart the machine, which works perfect, as before...

As you see it's not about installing virtualbox but about squeeze more power out of my machine to optimize virtualbox's performance...

I hope this is a better description of my problem? ;-)

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: Stuck on boot after enabling Intel VT-d in Bios

Okay, well you should still boot from another version of Linux, be it an additional installation on the bare metal, you a live cd or whatever.  Then gather information from the journal as to what is going on.  In other words, what you have posted so far (though I do have a better idea of what is going on now) does nothing but give a very general idea of your problem.  But you haven't tried to dig into the machine to see what it miht be telling you.

I know that on some machines, there are issues with the firmware and the virtualization stuff.  So you may want to look to see if ther has been a bios update for your machine.  You can also look at the readme for it to see if something like this has been addressed, but it might be a good idea to just update hte bios anyway.  Lenovo actually does a pretty good job at continually improving the firmware for their machines.  They actually address bugs and add new features sometimes.  For example, the AES-NI capabilities of my i5 3210M were borked since ~v2.08 of my bios.  With v2.51, which was only a couple months later, they had taken the bug reports and were able to fix the problem.

wucherpfennig

Member

From: Switzerland

Registered: 2013-06-02

Posts: 13

Re: Stuck on boot after enabling Intel VT-d in Bios

Well I kinda narrowed it down a bit. When I enable VT startup works. But when I enable VT-d it stops working. both options can be found under "security" > "virtualisation" in the bios. I've tried both options with a live cd too with the same result tha vt-d doesn't work.

Since I'm able now to run virtualbox with VT-x I'm wondering whether I would "feel" or benefit from the VT-d (enabled in bios)?

EDIT: I adjusted the threads title because it seems to affect only the VT-d option...

Last edited by wucherpfennig (2013-06-05 07:42:48)