Lost in the virtual machine

[GAshmore]

Hi everyone,
I've been trying to set up a VM to read discs and dump them on to my SMB share.
I seem to have run into a problem and I feel like it'll be something that will be stupidly simple but I don't know of the tools to diagnose it so I'm sorry in advance for probably asking a stupid question.
I'm using ubuntu server 16.04 LTS since it complained the least when booting in a virtual environment, I run through the installation process that the OS provides without an issue to a 20GB zvol over a VirtIO link, once the installation has completed I remove the CDROM device then reboot into Ubuntu this is fine after one or two reboots then the OS seems to disappear I'm not sure if it is disappearing or if the BIOS can't find it since when I try to reinstall Ubuntu it can see that there is a LVM partition on the disk so surely it's a bios issue? I'm completely lost on what I've messed up and I'd be grateful for an advise on how to fix this, how to better log it or experience on how to set up a VM I'm not tied to Ubuntu just anything that works.
Thank you very much if you can help me work out what I've done wrong :)

 

[sretalla]

Have you looked at this?

[HOWTO] How-to Boot Linux VMs using UEFI

There have been a number of threads were people have failed to boot a Linux VM after the installation phase using the webUI of FreeNAS 11 nightly, finding themselves stuck in the EFI shell and not knowing how to proceed nor how to avoid this happening each time their VM is started. It has been...

www.ixsystems.com

 

[KrisBee]

@GAshmore You say your VM disappears, but what are the symptoms? Do the FreeNAS logs show the VM crashes, or is it just loss of connectivity, e.g: can't ping, connect via ssh, or VNC? Are you using DHCP in the VM , is your router running out of leases?

IIRC Ubuntu 16.04 installed on LVM does not require a UEFI fix to ensure it boots via GRUB post install so the link given by @sretalla may not apply in this case.

 

[GAshmore]

@KrisBee Hi Kris Sorry about the poor explanation, after 2 to 3 reboots of the system the bios seems to not find the boot record for the OS, so I can connect to the VM but it leaves me in the bios menu with the only working boot options to go to the interactive shell or the grub shell

 

[GAshmore]

So to try and help I've just reinstalled the OS, rebooted once and I have ended up in ubuntu then rebooted again and it has left me in the interactive shell, am I just setting up the boot settings wrong?

 

[GAshmore]

If I boot from the efi file I return to ubuntu but I want to automate this and I don't know how to.

 

[GAshmore]

@sretalla Thank you very much for that tutorial I hadn't made the BOOT folder that is the only reason why it wasn't working sorry for not finding that post earlier, I didn't know the termonolgy to use to explain my problem

 

[KrisBee]

@GAshmore Sounds like you've sorted it now. FYI ubuntu 18 & 19 shouldn't need any post install EFI fix.., but once you remove your install CDROM device form the VM you might need to re-configure the NIC for connectivity/

 

[GAshmore]

@KrisBee I'm using Ubuntu 16.04 since I had the least issues the newer versions spit out a few kernal warnings that scared me off, thank you, everything seems to be working as expected now! :)