DmiSystemSerial value must start with a Letter, if Value starts with a number VBox Will Crash

[Chris V]

I have this problem trying to set the DMI of my linux virt (called MyVirt) using the setextradata command found in the manual (section 9 advanced topics).

The DMI I was trying to use on my box was "666551". For some reason every time I ran the setextradata command like this:

VBoxManage setextradata MyVirt "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcbios/0/Config/DmiSystemSerial" "666551"

and attempted to run my box from the GUI, the VBox program would crash.

I have been working all day to find the root cause of this problem. So as a test I have changed the value of the DmiSystemSerial to a random value that starts with a letter and ran:

VBoxManage setextradata MyVirt "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcbios/0/Config/DmiSystemSerial" "D152358"

on my box MyVirt. I found that when I started "MyVirt" using the VBox GUI the box ran just fine! I booted up a recovery image through the virt and ran dmidecode and the value matched correctly!

This means that the DmiSystemSerial must be set to a value that starts with a letter, or else the virt will fail to start if ran. This makes it impossible to run a virt that requires a DmiSystemSerial value that starts with a number (like in my pxeboot kickstart environment).

I have googled around the internet for a fix for this, and found many others in other vm related forums having this same issue.

In terms of searching for existing open tickets, I tried every search value combination and found nothing.

My host machine is Windows 7, but I have also tested this out on my Windows XP box. I am not sure if this is only local to Windows hosts. It could be possible.

[Chris V]

Ticket Log

[Frank Mehnert]

First, VBox does not crash but shows a proper error message.

Second, the fix for your problem is to do

VBoxManage setextradata MyVirt \
  "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcbios/0/Config/DmiSystemSerial" "string:666551"

This is not documented though. Will add this to the documentation.