Virtual Machine Unable to Reliably See Harddrive

[jetblackrx89]

When launching Disk Utility immediately after selecting the language for the installer, the hard drive will only appear properly about once out of every 20 or so boots.

Formatting the the drive as HFS doesn't help. Even post-install, when the VM reboots, there is a high chance the hard drive won't be detected on the next boot. I'm not sure if this is an issue with VirtualBox itself.

I have tried all types of hard disks and both dynamic and fixed sizes. There is so far no pattern in terms of when the hard drive decides to be detected.

[ranma42]

This is indeed one of the troublesome part of the installation; in step 3 in https://github.com/ranma42/TigerOnVBox#install-mac-os-x I suggest to wait about 1 minute before rebooting to try again.

In my experience this is especially troublesome in the first boot.

I experimented with various settings, but so far I have been unable to determine the settings that would guarantee that the disk is always detected.

I do not expect that changing disk image type would affect this.
Instead, I believe that some settings in the type of disk controller (IDE instead of SATA? which one?) might help. I gave those a try, but every once in a while it might be worth checking again to see if anything changed with newer VirtualBox versions.

[jetblackrx89]

Thanks. I ended up starting over from scratch by redeploying your OVA, but this time, I modified the storage controller to use ICH9 instead of OHCI as you had it set. It seems Virtualbox 6.1 likes this option a lot better, because the harddisk is now being seen reliably on every single boot, where-as before, it was seen maybe 5% of the time at best.

If you can confirm ICH9 works for you as well, it might be better to use that in the install guides, since other people were seeing this behavior too. I see that's generally the preferred controller type in other MacOS VirtualBox tutorials I found on the web.

[ranma42]

Thank you for trying it out and reporting back :)
I will confirm it soonish (probably by the end of the month) and update the guide accordingly.

[jeffhayford]

Can confirm changing it to ICH9 works much better, rebooted a few times and it's been solid.

[ranma42]

@jetblackrx89 the controllers you mention seems to be quite mixed up: OHCI is a USB controller and ICH9 is a motherboard chipset.

For most of these settings, the procedure goes with the default, which are:

• motherboard chipset ICH9
• storage controller AHCI
• USB controller OHCI
  (this can be checked in https://github.com/ranma42/TigerOnVBox/blob/master/Tiger.ova )

@jetblackrx89 @jeffhayford what change did you try that improved the disk reliability?
Maybe changing the storage controller from AHCI to ICH6?

[seb201]

I have the same problem. Then I create a new ICH6 (IDE) Controller and put the Tiger-disk001.vdi image inside the ICH6 Controller. The DVD Drive is still a SATA Drive. Work perfect.

I have a iMac 4K so i type in host terminal:
VBoxManage setextradata Tiger VBoxInternal2/EfiGraphicsResolution 2560x1600

And set the scale factor in VirtualBox to 144%.
This command doesn't work: VBoxManage setextradata Tiger VBoxInternal2/EfiGopMode 5