Cannot create SATA-only guest

[Costin Grigoras]

On one particular host if I try to create a guest (32 or 64bit) with SATA (AHCI) controller enabled and the only virtual disk mapped as SATA Port 0 I get this message and the virtual machine doesn't start:

Failed to start the virtual machine Testing.
PIIX3 cannot attach drive to the Primary Master (VERR_PDM_CFG_MISSING_DRIVER_NAME).
Unknown error creating VM (VERR_PDM_CFG_MISSING_DRIVER_NAME).


Result Code: 
NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005)
Component: 
Console
Interface: 
IConsole {0a51994b-cbc6-4686-94eb-d4e4023280e2}

I've tried the same on 3 other host machines but there everything is fine. On this particular host I've tried going back to 2.2.4 but the error was the same, then forward to 3.0.0 and still got the same problem.

[aeichner]

You have FlushInterval and IgnoreFlush set for LUN#0 of the IDE device but no hard disk attached. You have to remove these two entries to get VirtualBox working. You need to do:
VBoxManage setextradata VMNAME "VBoxInternal/Devices/piix3ide/0/LUN#0/Config/FlushInterval"
VBoxManage setextradata VMNAME "VBoxInternal/Devices/piix3ide/0/LUN#0/Config/IgnoreFlush"

to remove these. VirtualBox should work again afterwards.

[Costin Grigoras]

Thanks, it makes sense. But I'll have to remove the two options from the global set and add them back to each of the guests except the one that uses SATA. I think it would be much nicer if the options that don't apply were silently ignored, or at least logged as warnings but not prevent the guest from running.

Since there is no problem if the IDE controller is any of the IDE ones (piix3, piix4 or ich6), does this mean that the two Flush options apply in fact to any IDE regardless of its apparent type?