Ubuntu
virtualbox-guest-additions package

Ubuntu guest will not start in VBox after upgrade to Natty

Asked by Eduardo Kortright

I am running VirtualBox 4.0.6 on Windows 7 64-bit.

I was running Ubuntu 10 as a guest, and upgraded to 11.04 from update manager. After the upgrade completed, I was asked to restart.

After the VM restarted, it looked like Ubuntu was starting up. After a lot of disk activity I got to the Ubuntu splash page, and it stays there forever doing nothing. The dots under the word Ubuntu never changed color; the task manager on the host shows no activity for the VirtualBox process.

Restarting the VM or the host OS have no effect; it always stops at the splash screen and nothing changes after that.

If there is a way to display any diagnostic information I can supply it, but I don't know what it is.

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Ubuntu virtualbox-guest-additions Edit question
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Michael Wood
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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#1

Try adding the boot option:

nomodeset

You can do this in root recovery mode

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Eduardo Kortright (ekortright) said : 		#2

Thanks, but this does not solve my problem.

I edited the boot options and added nomodeset as you suggested (following instructions in http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1613132).

But I get the same behavior: I still get the splash screen, but it stays frozen forever.

Since I can now get to GRUB, I can boot in recovery mode, and I can log in to a shell. Is there anything else I can do to diagnose the normal startup?

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Eduardo Kortright (ekortright) said : 		#3

OK, I found where to look in the log for X startup errors: /var/log/Xorg.0.log

There it said that it could not load the display "vboxvideo", which I had had to add to get a monitor resolution that matches my monitor (otherwise I get a maximum size of 1024x768). Apparently, Natty does not like this. I commented out the display and Ubuntu now boots OK, just at a lower resolution than I would like.

Does anyone know of a way to get my true monitor's resolution with Natty?

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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#4

Could use this:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=777759

And change the resolution in the file

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Best Michael Wood (mwood) said : 		#5

It sounds like you need to reinstall the VirtualBox guest additions.

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Eduardo Kortright (ekortright) said : 		#6

Thank you, but I'm still where I was before.

1) The changes suggested by actionparsnip were what was causing Ubuntu not to boot in the first place. The display "vboxvideo" is not recognized.
2) Reinstalling the guest additions resulted in it not being able to mount my shared drive (not a big deal, but this was working before). And setting the display back to "vboxvideo" makes it freeze on the splash screen.

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Eduardo Kortright (ekortright) said : 		#7

Wait, I take that back. I reinstalled the Guest Additions once more. This time after rebooting, the monitor was automatically detected. I am not sure what happened (I know I did reboot at least a couple of times after resintalling the first time).

Anyway, I deleted the /etc/X11/xorg.conf since the monitor and mouse seem to be detected automatically now.

I still have to fix my shared folder problem, but that is probably something else. If I can't figure it out, I will ask a new question.

Thank you all very much for your assistance!

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Eduardo Kortright (ekortright) said : 		#8

Thanks Michael Wood, that solved my question.