Ubuntu – 16.04 VirtualBox VM (from vhd file) hangs at “non blocking pool is initialized”

16.04azurehyper-vvirtualbox

I'm trying to boot Canonical's Azure 16.04 .vhd file in a VirtualBox VM and it hangs at "non blocking pool is initialized".

It works in Hyper-V, so it may only be a bug in virtual box (5.0.20).

Best Answer

This is long-standing bug in the images released by Canonical.

The grub configuration is trying to use a serial port, but when it is not there, it fails to handle this gracefully. So, either add a serial port or change grub not to requires it.

Three options here to get it to boot the first time:

  1. if the grub menu is available, you can edit the boot arguments to remove console=ttyS0
  2. you can also enable a serial port in VirtualBox
  3. you can mount the drive from another VM or via loopback device and remove console=ttyS0 from /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Two options to get it to boot thereafter:

  1. leave a serial port attached via VirtualBox
  2. override the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT value in /etc/default/grub or /etc/default/grub.d/*.cfg to not include console=ttyS0, then run sudo update-grub and verify /boot/grub/grub.cfg has your changes.
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