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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4 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.

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