VirtualBox problem booting FreeBSD-9.0-RELEASE-amd64-bootonly.iso

[Craig Rodrigues]

Hi,

I am trying to run FreeBSD-9.0-RELEASE-amd64-bootonly.iso
inside VirtualBox and am having some problems.

The error messages I am getting are similar to the ones mentioned here:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2011-December/065079.html




My host environment
===================

Operating System: Windows 7, home edition, 64-bit
VirtualBox for Windows, version 4.1.12 r77245

CPU Information
================

I downloaded the CoreInfo.exe utility which is part of Windows
Sysinternals utilities
( http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb545027 )

According to this utility, my CPU is:
============================================================
    Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU     T5450  @ 1.66GHz
    Intel64 Family 6 Model 15 Stepping 13, GenuineIntel
    HTT       	*	Hyperthreading enabled
    HYPERVISOR	-	Hypervisor is present
    VMX       	-	Supports Intel hardware-assisted virtualization
    SVM       	-	Supports AMD hardware-assisted virtualization
    EM64T     	*	Supports 64-bit mode
============================================================

So my CPU support 64-bit mode, but does not support hardware-assisted
virtualization.



Error message
=============
If I try to mount and then boot it under VirtualBox, I get this error:

   CPU doesn't support long mode

   Consoles: internal video/keyboard
   BIOS drive C: is disk0
   BIOS 639kB/523264kB available memory

   FreeBSD/x86 bootstrap loader, Revision 1.1
   (root at farrell.cse.buffalo.edu, Tue Jan  3 06:51:49 UTC 2012)
   Can't work out which disk we are booting from.
   Guess BIOS device 0xffffffff not found by probes, defaulting to disk0:
   FATAL: int13_harddisk: function 42. Can't use 64bits lba



Does anyone know how to fix this problem in VirtualBox?




QEMU for Windows
================

Just to try something else, I downloaded QEMU 0.9.0 for Windows from:

http://www.h7.dion.ne.jp/~qemu-win/

I extracted the zip file into a directory:  C:\local\qemu-0.9.0-windows

I then ran:

   cd c:\local\qemu-0.9.0-windows
   qemu-system-x86_64.exe -L . -m 128 -cdrom
c:\temp\FreeBSD-9.0-RELEASE-amd64-bootonly.iso

The ISO booted up just fine.  From the dmesg output, this was the emulated CPU:

   CPU: QEMU Virtual CPU version 0.9.0 (1666.98-MHz K8-class CPU)
    Origin = "AuthenticAMD" Id = 0x623 Family = 6 Model = 2 Stepping = 3
    Features=0x78bfbfd<FPU,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,SE36,CLFLUSH,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2>
    Features2=0x1<SSE3>
    AMD Features=0x20100800<SYSCALL,NX,LM>




Does anyone know how I can get VirtualBox to behave the same way
as QEMU for FreeBSD-9.0-RELEASE-amd64-bootonly.iso?

Thanks.

--
Craig Rodrigues
rodrigc at crodrigues.org