Regression: raw disks/partitions on SATA no longer recognized -> fixed in SVN

[Holger Hoffstätte]

I was very happy that vBox 2.0.x managed to boot a Linux guest (on a Windows XP host) off of a raw partition mapped to a .vmdk attached to a native Windows SATA controller (I run my SATA drive in native mode with the Intel drivers, not IDE emulation). I mapped the entire disk of my dual-boot laptop (as described in the "advanced" section of the docs), registered the disk image and could boot into grub and subsequently Linux - no problems. This does not work in vBox 2.1 any longer; the guest VM dies even before the "BIOS" screen is shown. It does not crash when SATA is enabled but no disks are attached, probably because the controller is simply not used. Switching the attached disk to use an IDE adapter lets 2.1 boot into grub & the guest kernel (so things basically work!), but mounting / subsequently fails because fstab wants to access /dev/sdX. I also tried to recreate the virtual raw disk with 2.1 (hoping it was just a format incompatibility), but the same symptom occurs.

[Holger Hoffstätte]

vBox log of crash with raw disk on SATA

[aeichner]

Can you attach the raw vmdk please?

[Holger Hoffstätte]

VMDK that maps the full physical disk and worked with vBox 2.0.x

[Holger Hoffstätte]

VMDK attached; thanks for looking into this.

[aeichner]

Fixed in the next release. As a workaround you can do the following:

VBoxManage.exe setextradata "Your VM" "VBoxInternal/Devices/ahci/0/Config/UseAsyncInterfaceIfAvailable" 0

This should make raw VMDK's work with 2.1.0 Thanks for the report and sorry for the inconveniences.

[Holger Hoffstätte]

Thanks you for the suggestion - unfortunately it does not work. I tried both the VM name and "global" as values but neither did the trick. The error seems to be the same.