Bug 20597

Summary: FYI: Adding SSD may confuse VirtualBox installs
Product: Mageia Reporter: Pierre Fortin <pf>
Component: RPM PackagesAssignee: Thomas Backlund <tmb>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED QA Contact:
Severity: minor    
Priority: Normal CC: marja11
Version: CauldronKeywords: NEEDINFO
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Source RPM: virtualbox CVE:
Status comment:

Description Pierre Fortin 2017-03-29 21:09:22 CEST
This issue being filed to provide a clue for SSD users.

Starting with a 2 HD Dell M6800, VB saw the drives as HD1 = sda & HD2 = sdb.

Adding a Samsung EVO 250GB SSD drive caused Linux to assign drives as:

    HD1 = sda, SSD = sdb & HD2 = sdc

My local Mageia Linux install repository resides on HD2p7. This physical source disk was originally defined in VBox's DIST[-pt].vmdk as sdb. After the SSD was installed, VB could no longer see the installation files because HD2(sdb) was now at sdc.

Simply editing DIST.vmdk to change the only occurrence of sdb to sdc resolved the problem, allowing install to proceed.

Note: VBox disk mappings differ from real HDs  i.e.:
  Linux: HD1 = sda, SSD = sdb, HD2 = sdc
  VBox:  sda = virtual disk file, sdb = sdb before SSD | sdc after SSD install.
Comment 1 Marja Van Waes 2017-03-30 09:16:31 CEST
Is this only with Mageia 6 VBox host? Or with both Mga6 and mga5 host?

Keywords: (none) => NEEDINFO
CC: (none) => marja11
Component: Installer => RPM Packages
Assignee: bugsquad => tmb
Source RPM: (none) => virtualbox

Comment 2 Thomas Backlund 2017-03-30 09:44:19 CEST
That's normal

If you change/add/remove physical disks so the physical order changes, you need to adapt accordingly.

Linux adapts automatically if you do uuid (like we do by default) or label mounts ...

So if you used /dev/sd* in vbox config, so it will need updating

You could have used /dev/disk/by-uuid/* or /dev/disk/by-label/*

to get a mount Point that auto-adapts

Status: NEW => RESOLVED
Resolution: (none) => INVALID

Comment 3 Pierre Fortin 2017-03-30 15:35:57 CEST
Note that this was opened as an FYI -- to provide info for anyone else running into this issue.

@ Marja
The version is immaterial (currently running 6 as guest on 5.1 host. The issue is that adding an SSD into a 2 HD laptop changed the storage order and VB storage config needs to be adjusted.

@ Thomas
Mostly true.  The difficulty, and the reason for my FYI, is that host moved the 2nd HD, then many days later, firing up VB "looked" like it did before (sda & sdb); only sdb was totally invalid with no clue why[1] until I finally figured out that the vmdk was now wrong.

Unfortunately, according to their latest manual, VBox 5.1.18 still does not support UUIDs for storage. Reported to Oracle at https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/16622 as an enhancement request.

[1] the installation screen even showed the correct partition scheme, apparently from the DIST-pt.vmdk file which added to the initial confusion.

Resolution: INVALID => FIXED

Comment 4 Pierre Fortin 2017-03-31 17:12:50 CEST
Update: Where the VBox UserManual section 9.9.1.2 reads "/dev/sda", the disk specification can instead be specified as "/dev/disk/by-id/<ID>" where ID can be determined with "ls -l /dev/disk/by-id".  

/dev/disk/by-uuid/* and /dev/disk/by-label/* (specific to partitions) are not supported as of VB 5.1.18; so partitions can not yet be specified this way.