Has anybody succeeded installing RHEL on VBox?

Question

I tried to install RHEL 5.4 both 64 and 32 bits on VirtualBox 3.2.4-62467 in Ubuntu 9.1 with no success. It all goes fine but in the end gets stuck. Any success stories ? Hints ? Thanks

Answer 1

Quick glance here shows it should be working. Are you using the repo version or the downloaded .deb from Virtualbox? I've had better luck with the version directly from VBox.

Answer 2

I had the same problem with both 32/64 bit versions of RHEL 5.5 on VirtualBox 3.2.4 and 3.1.8. I'm using 64bit Ubuntu 9.10 as well. Both VirtualBox installs were done via the official VBox apt repository. After doing a lot of searching, my best guess is that this is related to a problem with virtual disks that are stored on ext4 partitions. Moving your virtual disks to an ext3 partition should work.

However, what I ended up doing is removing the SATA controller in the VirtualBox storage settings. SATA was the default on my system when I created the VM so I deleted the SATA controller and then added the virtual disk to the IDE Controller as the primary master. Simply moving the virtual disk to the IDE controller and not removing the SATA controller didn't work for some reason. Once I did this my 64 bit install was finally able to boot post install. I hope this helps.

Answer 3

If this situation is anything like OpenSolaris with AMD processors, then it may come down to possibly older AMD lines not be "accepted" by the OS. In some cases, the Windows version of the Virtualbox hypervisor may be more "forgiving" with the older AMD lines.

Answer 4

When you say “the end” does that mean it installs but then can't boot? Do you get any sort of errors during boot after the install? Specifically about the NMI watchdog?

When I was testing some CentOS5 VMs on VirtualBox, I ran into a similar issue. I Googled based on that error and I ending up adding something to the end of the grub boot command which made it work: nmi_watchdog=0