Guest won't boot in EFI mode after deleting/adding main disk file

[vclement]

Setup: 2 VDI disks. EFI mode enabled (the main disk can only boot in EFI mode). Hard disk as first device in System/Boot order VM settings. Regular rebuild of disk images: regular re-add of those images in the storage settings.

After update to VBox 6.1.0, we encountered a bug where after removing and re-adding the bootable media (VDI disk) from the VM storage settings, it won't be able to boot anymore.

It tries to boot in PXE mode and drops into an EFI shell after some time. I can boot by running the bootx64.efi executable from the shell.

When entering the bios/uefi menu (after exiting EFI shell), we can see that the disk is not in the boot options anymore, there are only PXE and EFI shell.

Reverting to 6.0.14 make it works as expected (boot correctly after disk change).

[vclement]

More info:

The first boot after disk configuration change shows an error message in the guest display:

BdsDxe: failed  to load Boot001 "UEFI VBOX HARDDISK VBe51fb866-d3cb6b43 " from PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x1,0x1)/Ata(Primary,Master,0x0): Not Found

>>Start PXE over IPv4.

Subsequent boots only show the Start PXE over IPv4. line.

[aeichner]

We need at least a VBox.log of the affected VM to start investigating this issue.

[vclement]

VBox log - 6.1.4 - no boot

[vclement]

I retested it today on VBox 6.1.4 (with my existing machine working on 6.0.14). Same result, it only shows >>>Start PXE over IPv4 then fails. I attached the VBox.log this time.

[aeichner]

I tried that locally with an Ubuntu 19.04 guest but it still boots after detaching the disk and attaching it again. Can you provide a VBox.log for the working case and after it stopped working? Maybe I can spot a difference in the VM config. What kind of guest are you running?

[vclement]

VBox log - 6.0.14 - boot ok

[vclement]

Here is the VBox.log for the same guest machine (configuration untouched) after rolling back to 6.0.14.

The guest is based on AOSP, so Linux based, and we use Grub as UEFI bootloader. We rely on EFI fallback boot (\EFI\boot\bootx64.efi).

We use two disks, the first is EFI bootable (first partition is ESP) and the second disk is not (used for storage).

[Roman Valov]

+1 here

I'm using only 1 disk drive which is periodically regenerated from raw disk images. There is 1st bootable EFI partition on disk image with EFI\BOOT\BOOTX64.EFI file available. The VirtualBox VM shows me UEFI interactive shell and I'm able to continue booting if I specify path to bootloader manually:

FS0:\EFI\BOOT\BOOTX64.EFI

Reverting VirtualBox to 6.0 makes the system bootable automatically

[Graham Perrin]

Cc: grahamperrin