Centos Virtualbox 64bit boot problem

It has been a while since my last blog post and plenty of things have happened in the mean time. The biggest change for me is that I have left Perth, Western Australia and moved to Toronto, Canada.

But now for the reason of this post. Before I moved to Canada, I had set up a virtual machine running Centos 5.3 x64 so I can do development on my Macbook pro, but when i booted up the virtualbox image, I received this error:

Memory for crash kernel (0×0 to 0×0) notwithin permissible range

Kernel alive
kernel direct mapping tables up to 100000000 @ 8000-d000

Now according to the VirtualBox manual, you have to enable IO APIC if you want to run a 64-bit guest. But once I had enabled IO APIC, it would still not boot up and just displayed a whole list of errors. To get the virtual machine running, I modified the boot parameters and added: “noapic” to the end of the kernel arguments (without quotes) and the virtual machine was able to boot up. After Centos was booted up, I edited “/boot/grub/menu.lst” and added the noapic parameter to the kernel arguments so I didnt have to add the parameter every time I turn the virtaul machine on.

I hope this will help anyway who is having the same problem, as I know it has helped at least one person :)

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5 Responses to “Centos Virtualbox 64bit boot problem”

  1. Yes this was very helpful. Thanks for taking the time to write it down.

  2. Mark Knowles says:

    Nice work Ben! Works like a charm.

  3. Ben Maynard says:

    Good to hear my post is helping other people aswell :)

  4. I found this post while surfing the net some random stuff. Thanks for sharing will be sure to follow this blog regularly and will email this post to my friends.

  5. Excellent points you made here with this write-up. I just read this a few times just to make certain I was reading you the right way. I actually value your own stance and I shall be guaranteed to come back here.

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