VirtualBox very often fails at booting OS/2 Warp guests

[mcandre]

About 50% of the time, guests configured OS/2, eComStation, etc. fail to boot correctly. A typical OS/2 Warp 4.0 guest, for example, will show a black screen with a blinking cursor instead any of the usual boot splashes. This significantly impacts the usefulness of the VirtualBox hypervisor.

As a workaround in my Packer and Vagrant scripts, I am retrying a whole lotta boots. A three-boot process just to install OS/2 Warp has a success rate of 12.5% (yuck!)

[Socratis]

Did you try the whole process Vangrant-less/Packer-less? Because they're not really supported, they have their own support channels.

1. It's usually better and faster, if issues get first addressed in the ​VirtualBox forums, a lot more eyes there. More than 95% of the issues are resolved in the forums, which keeps the developers focusing on the bug fixes and enhancements, and there is no need for another ticket to keep track of. For example, yours is most probably not a bug and someone from the developers has to deal with it and close it as "Invalid".

Plus a discussion and analysis on the bug tracker is going to help me, you, and potentially a future drive-by user or two. Not so in the forums, many more tend to benefit.

Please, open a new thread in the ​Other Guests section of the forums. Please be sure to mention that you came from the bug tracker and include the ticket number.

2. You were supposed to follow these steps when you filed the bug, and provide a VBox.log:

   Attach a (full) log file ("Machine" menu/"Show Log" in the main VirtualBox Manager window) straight away to save time for you and for us. The log file contains a lot of useful information about both the host and the guest systems as well as information about what happened during a particular machine run. Please do not cut and paste it.

[mcandre]

Note that Packer and Vagrant simply wrap VirtualBox, they don't do anything special. They just make it rapid to reproduce similar environments, including when debugging VirtualBox issues.

[aeichner]

I have no problem booting OS/2 guests on my system here. Please provide at least a VBox.log of the affected VM so we can try to reproduce it with a setup as close as yours.

[aeichner]

No response so far, closing for now. Please reopen if you attached the requested VBox.log using the most recent VirtualBox release (either 6.0 or 6.1).