Several VMs Have Suddenly Quit Working, In VBox.

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Hi all!

I have several VMs, all in virtualbox 6.0.14 and all the VBOX add-ons are up to date.

I don’t use them daily, last used any of them probably 4-6 weeks ago, pretty sure it was already running 6.0.14 by that time. they were all fine when last used.

Two of them are C7, one is a clone of the other, and the other is C8. each seems to have different symptoms.

the C7 clone claims there is no initramfs, no matter which kernel I
try to boot. See first attachment.

One thought on - Several VMs Have Suddenly Quit Working, In VBox.

  • and of course I hit the wrong key so it sent the mail before I was done typing. :(

    And I apologize, the VBox window in which the system is booting doesn’t let me select text for cut and paste, so the best I can do is to either do a screendump and attach it, or to retype what I
    see (as I’ve done below).

    I can probably boot a rescue CD and rebuild initramfs, but the greater question in my mind is why in the world would THREE VMs all go wonky at (AFAICT) the same time?

    The one that C7-clone was cloned from (C7) dies with:

    Starting Switch Root…
    [!!!!!!] Failed to load SELinux policy, freezing

    and does the same thing no matter which kernel I boot.

    the C8 system goes on for along way and eventually dies with this on the screen:

    failed to mount RPC Pipe File System. see ‘systemctl status var-lib-nfs-rpc=pipefs.mount’ for details.

    then a bunch of OK entries then:
    [FAILED] Failed to start crash recovery kernel arming. see ‘systemctl status kdump.service’ for details
    [FAILED] Failed to start crash recovery kernel arming. see ‘systemctl status kdump.service’ for details you are in emergency mode. After logging in, type “journalctl -xb” to view system logs…

    Looking at journalctl -xb output there is a TON of stuff that means little-to-nothing to me, but near the end I see this:

    [1734]: Error /boot/vmlinuz-4.18.0-80.11.2.el8_0.x86_64 not found.
    : Starting kdump [FAILED]
    …
    …
    –Subject: Unit kdump.service has failed

    then some more lines of apparently explanatory material, but no errors, except for the last line that says:

    systemd[1]: Received SIGRTMIN+21 from PID 369 (plymouthd).

    Scrolling back thru the output I see had come up earlier:
    mount: /boot: unknown filesystem type ‘ext4’
    boot.mount: Mount process exited, code=exited status2
    Failed to mount /boot.

    I installed C8 with default filesystems, so I’d sorta thunk they would be XFS, so is it legitimate for it to find /boot as ext4?
    and even so, why would ext4 not be a legitimate FS type?

    So, I’m horribly confused here, I’d appreciate suggestions on these matters.

    thanks in advance!

    Fred