Fedora Virtual Box Boots to Black Screen With Cursor

1. 18th July 2019,02:48 PM #1

   VirtualBox Black Screen When Booting a VM

   Hey guys! I've just signed up to this forum so this is my very first post. Let's go to the issue...

   I have a Windows 10 bootable pendrive and I need to install it as a guest VM.
   I created a vmdk file based on my pendrive, like this:

   

   Everything looks fine. I have my VM configured just as I used to do when I used Windows. This is my setup:

   

   When I start the VM, I select the 2nd HD (which is my pendrive):

   

   Now the problem comes up! I get stuck in this black screen, with that blinking underline in the upper left corner:

   

   I'm using VirtualBox 6.0.10 and Fedora 30. My pendrive works fine, if I plug it in another PC and boot into it I can get to Windows installation screen normally.
   I'm desperate guys! I couldn't find a solution anywhere! I'm a recent Linux user so I'm not too familiar with everything yet!
   Anyone could help me?! If you need any other info, let me know!

   ---

2. 18th July 2019,05:47 PM #2

   Re: VirtualBox Black Screen When Booting a VM

   Code:

   I created a vmdk file

   How? Generally, we run VirtualBox, add a new (Windows 10) machine and answer the settings prompts to set up the "environment" - then 'feed' it the Windows install disk to Install Windows 10 into that environment.

   Is this what you did? Or are you trying to skip the install step and using the pen drive 'already installed' image (from a different environment)? I'd tend to think the actual Windows Installation process would be critical to having it run, but ...

   Last edited by lightman47; 18th July 2019 at 05:59 PM.

   ---

   Remember - importing/building packages will likely "byte you in the butt" come update/upgrade time, long after you'd forgotten you did that! Use repos whenever possible.

   ---

3. 18th July 2019,06:07 PM #3

   Re: VirtualBox Black Screen When Booting a VM

   Hey lightman47, thank you for answering me!
   I did all the initial settings in virtualbox as you said. I created a vmdk disk based on my pendrive just to make virtualbox see it as a bootable disk. I have done this before, but in a Windows machine, it always worked pretty well. My pendrive is the installation media, I just want to boot into it to get through Windows installation.

   ---

4. 18th July 2019,06:18 PM #4

   Re: VirtualBox Black Screen When Booting a VM

   Ahh! I misunderstood. Apologies.

   I personally have had horrible luck with VB and recognizing/connecting to USB drives - and that was AFTER an Operating System install! Hopefully someone with more savvy will have your solution.

   ---

   Remember - importing/building packages will likely "byte you in the butt" come update/upgrade time, long after you'd forgotten you did that! Use repos whenever possible.

   ---

5. 18th July 2019,06:42 PM #5

   Re: VirtualBox Black Screen When Booting a VM

   I managed to work around it. Here at the company I work, we use FOG Server. It is an open source image cloning server (for those who don't know it).
   There we have a base Windows image that was captured from a PC some time ago, so I booted my VM via network and deployed this base image from FOG to my VM! Now I can boot normally into Windows!
   This method does not solve the problem I was having, but now at least I can use the VM normally. I won't change the thread to [SOLVED] because there actually was no solution yet to the specific installing Windows booting via pendrive problem.

   Hope you guys still want to help sending suggestions, you know...this can be someone else's problem too! I'll setup a new VM and keep trying to solve this, any suggestions let me know guys!

   ---

Fedora Virtual Box Boots to Black Screen With Cursor

Source: https://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?321996-VirtualBox-Black-Screen-When-Booting-a-VM

Share this post