Cachyos as client of virtualbox 7.1.4

I installed cachyos as a xfce raw metal install and it boots as expected. Next I rebooted my daily arch system (Manjaro) and tried to run cachyos as a client of virtualbox using VMDK method. Cachyos hangs with “loading initial rawdisk” and nothng happens for a LONG time. Powered off the client and re installed cachy again, with a new download, didn’t help.
Need help in next steps to determine the cause and fix for hang.
(Additionally I have several other clients (About 15) installed the same way that boot as virtualbox clients.)

If you enabled “3D Acceleration”, turn it off and it should load up normally.

One of my goals for 2025 was to use VMs for as much as I can and while installing CachyOS Gnome as a Guest OS on VirtualBox, noticed the same you did. :slight_smile:

If you don’t check the box in the Virtualbox “Create Virtual Machine” window for the Cachyos VM that says something like “EFI Boot (for special operating systems only)”, then you should probably boot the installer with the 3rd option, which is the “Fallback for bios systems”, or something similar option.

I’m going to try it now.

UPDATE: I just failed to boot a VM with VMDK, without EFI boot checked , and with the Fallback Cachy boot option.

I then booted one with the EFI box checked, with VMDK, and with the 1st CachyOS regular boot option.

On a side note: The virtualbox-meta package from the AUR (which I’ve been using for years) was broken last night and wouldn’t install. I sure hope they fix it, but I’m surprised to say I was able to select all the pkgs and make all necessary configs to get it set up on the 1st try.

I don’t use 3D on any of my client installations. Just for the record I install all of my clients as raw metal first and boot them to assure they work as a ‘standalone’ install before setting up a client VMDK install to run the client virtually. This requires installing a UEFI partition unique to each client so I can limit the virtual client to seeing only it’s volumes. (All of my clients are installed on a single NVME 2TB storage device so I want each client to be isolated from the other clients. This process works fine for all the other clients, but I can’t get cachyos to load so I can install guest additions.)
If you have a like situation, how did you resolve it ?

I always check the EFI box as all my storage is GPT and UEFI. I disposed of all my legacy systems a while ago and though I have a Win11 guest, it is not my daily system. For daily I use Manjaro as my host system for vbox. All my clients are accessed via vbox VMDK as I install clients as raw metal prior to setting up client access to them. The problem with cachyos is that though it boots raw metal and runs fine, it hangs with the “echo” message ‘loading initial ramdisk’ on the screen. (This a grub and xfce4 install of cachyos.)

I set “loglevel=7” and apparently I’m getting a 0x00000004 which i understand to be “failed opcode at init time”. I’ve tried differeent linux types in the vbox definition to no avail. (IE same fail, but that is probably expected.)
VBoxPanic|690x368
I’ve uploaded what is frozen on the display at failure.