Arch VirtualBox Guest Boots Partially, But No Command Line

steadybright · 2016-08-12 21:16:12

Greetings,

I have 64bit Arch guest running on a Windows 7 Pro 64bit Virtualbox host.

The Arch guest was running well until I used pacman to update to linux 4.7-1 and virtualbox-guest-modules-arch 5.1.2-2 packages yesterday.

After restarting the Arch guest, it will no longer boot successfully.

An error scrolls off the screen too quickly for me to read it, then a few clues that stay on the screen:

[* ] (1 of 3) A start job is running for sys-subsystem-net-devices enp0s3.device (<n>s of 1min 30s)
[* ] (2 of 3) A start job is running for sys-subsystem-net-devices enp0s8.device (<n>s of 1min 30s)
[* ] (3 of 3) A start job is running for VirtualBox Guest Service (<n>s of 1min 30s)

Eventually, all three fail to start

The boot process hangs prior to my getting a command prompt.

I’m not aware of any other changes to the guest or the host; I re-started the guest almost immediately upon completion of the pacman job.

I’ll be happy to send additional information as requested, although, I’m not sure how to access journal logs when booting from the live Arch disc.

I can access the Arch guest file system by either booting the Arch guest from the Arch live disk (guest virtual optical drive) and by opening the .vdi file in 7zip.

I am hopeful that if I can roll back the linux and virtualbox-guest-modules-arch updates, I can bring my system back to life, but I don’t know how to do this while booted from the live disk.

Thank you in advance for any help you may provide.

sb

WFV · 2016-08-13 18:28:25

I have similar problem with Arch guest on Arch host after upgrading (both) to 4.7-1. VirtualBox Guest Service says it is starting but fails to start vboxservice.service, vboxadd.service, and vboxadd-x11.service and fails to boot. I replaced the Arch guest (vdi) with last good backup, rebooted the guest and uninstalled virtualbox-guest-modules and virtualbox-guest-utils. I originally installed them because having the virtualbox-guest-iso on the host and mounting it in the guest could never get folder shares to work (also bash and zsh aren't recognizing rcvboxdrv or autorun.sh or runasroot.sh as commands from the guest-iso). I also stopped and disabled vboxservice.service, vboxadd.service, and vboxadd-x11.service via systemctl and removed all the virtualbox-guest-* packages from /var/cache/pacman/pkg/ then again rebooted the guest. It booted up without issue but no longer had shared folders but I kind of expected that - still can't run anything from the mounted virtualbox-guest-iso. Did pacman -Syyu and verified no virtualbox packages were being brought in. Got errors in the upgrade saying DKMS could not find modules in /usr/src/ because there are none, there used to be the vbox-guest-arch module in there prior to removing the packages only this time the bootup stops at "starting graphical interface" and just stays there indefinitely. I can drop to a command line when grub starts, but need to chroot to do more troubleshooting, haven't done yet got more reading and research to do. Prior to 4.7-1 Syu's had been mostly flawless for the Arch guest. So again replaced the vdi with the previous working Linux vbox 4.6.4-1-ARCH guest for now. Looks like there is another similar thread at https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=215763.

EDIT: removed virtualbox-guest-modules-arch and virtualbox-guest-utils from the Arch guest, installed virtualbox-guest-dkms 5.1.2-3 (the updated "fixed" version) and then -Syu'd guest to linux 4.7, so now Arch guest boots up on Arch host without issue and loaded the correct vbox guest modules in the update and boot however, none of the VirtualBox shared folders are working - the shared folders appear in /media/ and can open them but the contents appear empt. The folders themselves on the Arch host are very full... Not sure how to troubleshoot this, chowning made no difference, resetting them in the VirtualBox main menu made no difference and they're all set to auto-mount as they were before update, I'm a member of vboxsf and vboxusers groups in the Guest.

Last edited by WFV (2016-08-16 21:54:14)

Arch Linux

#1 2016-08-12 21:16:12

Arch VirtualBox Guest Boots Partially, But No Command Line

#2 2016-08-13 18:28:25

Re: Arch VirtualBox Guest Boots Partially, But No Command Line

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