Mint 13 inside VirtualBox falling apart

[Msyx]

Hi guys,

I'm running a Mint 13 32b in VB inside W7 x64 host. Latest VB and guest additions, but previously the same VM was on XP 32b with some older versions of VB and guest additions with the same results.

The problem I have: after I save and resume the Mint VM several times, it sometimes goes haywire with these symptoms:

1) Networking fails. The networking icon in the tray shows as disconnected.

Sometimes I can fix this by editing the network connections, removing the wired network and adding it again.

2) This fix often doesn't work though because when I open the list of network connections, there are no wired network listed. When I try to add a new one, I just get an edit dialog of the wired connection with the Save button greyed out. So I can't do anything here.

3) So I try to restart the networking using the console, but sudo fails to work completely. E.g. when I use <sudo command>, the console just gets stuck not doing anything, not asking for password. Just a blinking cursor.

4) Some other programs also don't start. For example the system monitor or network tools - if I start them from the menu, they don't show up although top shows them as running.

5) So I open a console and just use su - that works, I can log in as root. But I still can't do much - e.g. I can't kill those processes which are 'stuck' in 4). I send a kill signal and nothing happens. It also seems all the network services are stopped, but I can't start them (it just gets stuck like sudo). I say they 'seem' to be stopped because every other service says it's stopped which makes no sense I think.

6) Last but not least, sometimes the Cinnamon UI just disappears and reverts to Gnome or whatever it is. Console fonts also sometimes change to black on black color which makes things difficult. The menu bar and taskbar also tend to disappear. Not sure what crashes there.

I need to restart the VM to get it back on track and it works fine until I save and resume a few times.

Any ideas what to do about it? Despite it being a VM, I'd rather not reinstall from scratch. Also note no other Linux or Unix VM I'm running has these kinds of problems.

Thanks in advance!

[Cosmo.]

Taking the amount of problems you have, I don't believe, that it takes much sense to identify the problem with much effort.

You can try both of the following:
At first, start a live system with this very VM and see, if there are the same problems. This will tell you, if there is something wrong with the VM-settings itself or with the guest.

You can create a fresh new account on this machine an see, if this helps. To be honest, I give this no great chance, but it only takes a very short time to test this.

[Msyx]

Not sure what you mean, start a live system with the VM? You mean convert the VM to an installation on HDD and start directly as a regular OS (or live usb/CD)? Not sure what I'd accomplish by that since the issues are triggered by saving and resuming the VM which seems like a virtualization-specific thing.

I can try to make a new account. That said, I'm also very curious to find out what could be causing the issue in the first place. It would be easier just to make a new VM than to troubleshoot this thing, but I'm used to *nix systems being infinitely repairable so I'd just like to find what's going on. I've never heard of sudo or kill not working.

Maybe there's some memory corruption going on when the VM is saved and resumed? Any idea how to troubleshoot that?

[Cosmo.]

Not sure what you mean, start a live system with the VM?

You connect the CD-drive of the VM with the ISO-image of your installed system and launch this VM. It will start (as long, as you did not change the boot-order in the VM-settings) with this ISO as a live-system - just as you start a live system on your hardware.

[Msyx]

I'm missing something here... The Mint VM is on a virtual HDD (.vdi), not a ISO. I suppose I could convert that into a live DVD with some tools that surely exist but that would not solve the problem since I wouldn't be able to work in that VM.

I'd like to troubleshoot the problem itself but I don't even know where to start.

[Msyx]

Aha, I misunderstood. I thought he meant to convert the existing installation into a live CD. If it's just booting the original live CD, ok I get that.

Re moving the machine, I used the Machine > Add command to add the existing VM into the new guest. But the behavior was the same on XP32 so there's no difference in that regard. I tried to play with the VM settings (change RAM, video mem, number of CPUs, disable 3D accel), nothing changed.

Besides the live CD thing I suppose I can also try just creating a new VM and mount the existing Mint .vdi into that.

Ok I'll report back with that.

Still, any idea about troubleshooting the problem from inside the VM? As in, what could it be that's causing sudo and kill to fail? Because that's something totally weird and I'm not even sure who to ask for help. Mint devs? Kernel devs? Oracle devs?

[baj]

I guess I haven't done much with suspend/resume with my Linux VMs, they boot up and shutdown so quickly I guess I never bothered. I do suspend/resume my Windows 7 and WXP VMs all the time though. I do have issues with them getting glitchy after a number of suspend/resume cycles (more than a couple though), but that's no different than my experience with W7 and XP when installed at the host OS.

Have you tried setting up a fresh, new Mint 13 VM to see if it has similar issues?

-Brad

[Msyx]

What I did in the meantime was to completely uninstall and reinstall the guest utils in the Mint guest and so far the problems have not reappeared. So maybe that has fixed that. We'll see in a few resumes.