A couple of days ago, I was installing LMDE using VirtualBox. I'm fairly certain that I know when and how I accidentally caused the problem, but while LMDE was installing, I got a "Disk is full" warning, and within just a few seconds, the machine locked up completely. The only way out was the reset button on the front of the computer.
Before I go much further, some background information is necessary;
Virtual Box Graphical User Interface Version 4.3.10 r93102
I was running VirtualBox as 'user', not as root, and I am in the vboxusers group.
All of my .vdi's reside in my /home/al/VirtualBox VMs directory.
My '/' directory is 38.4G with 31.9G free.
(and now what I believe to have caused the problem)
When I created the new machine, I mistakenly chose Ubuntu (32bit) as the platform.... I was attempting to install LMDE 64bit.
Immediately after I booted the install .iso and selected 'Install Mint,' the virtual machine froze. Since there is almost always a delay from the time "Install Mint" begins till you see a change on the screen, I didn't realize quickly enough that the vm had locked up. I shut down the vm, and, instead of deleting the new LMDE, I just changed the platform to Ubuntu (64bit) and restarted the LMDE install .iso.
Meanwhile, I believe error messages were piling up at an alarming rate in the /var/log/**(something**.log..... enough to completely fill up 31.9G of space. Within a minute or two after restarting the install is when I received the "Disk is full" message.
Now, the good news is that I have a cloned-bootable backup of my entire system on a second hard drive. I was able to reboot to the backup drive, use Disk Usage Analyzer to determine that the primary /var directory was showing 31.9G, when it generally only uses 1.7G.
The bad news is that my "imediate supervisor" Mrs. OldWierdAl, needed to use our only computer, and her home directory had not been backed up for a few days.... thus she needed to use the primary drive for her urgent needs. Since a complete restoration could be done in as little as 6 - 10 minutes, and backing up her home directory could take considerably longer, I wisely chose to do the 'restoresys' script I had previously written for just such occasions, and had her back in business in just over 6 minutes, 38 seconds, including the reboot to the primary drive.
So, although I know that it was the /var directory which filled up the '/' partition, I can only surmise that it was some one of the /var/log/**'s which had actually filled up.
My question now is, which was it, and why? It surely had something to do with Virtual Box, and my careless mistake of choosing Ubuntu (32bit) instead of (64bit). If I can find the time, I'd like to make a separate partition available and try to recreate the problem in a safe environment.
Does anyone care to venture a guess as to what might have caused this? There really isn't any urgency, as everything is working, and my "imediate supervisor" is happy. However, 45 plus years of fixing things is making it really difficult for me to let go of this thing.
Thanks for your input, whomever. It will be much appreciated.

owa

Seems unlikely that anything could write 30 GB of logs in a few minutes. My guess would be to look at /var/tmp which virtualbox uses for working directories.

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Nope, it's unlikely you would have been able to get it to start to boot very far and it shouldn't have locked up the entire system.

"hen I created the new machine, I mistakenly chose Ubuntu (32bit) as the platform.... I was attempting to install LMDE 64bit.
Immediately after I booted the install .iso and selected 'I"

Issues that I'd suspect is faulty motherboard support for pal and firmware in linux. Also could be lack of ram or ram issue.

@jefro Are you referring to the host motherboard and ram or to the virtualbox motherboard and ram? I have deleted the original failed virtual LMDE, so I can't post the setup I used. But I almost always use the same setup for all my virtual machines;
I have 4G of host ram, so I give the virtual machines 1024M ram, 64M video memory, and use the default VirtualBox chipset of PIIX3.
My machine runs on;
$ lspci
00:00.0 RAM memory: NVIDIA Corporation MCP61 Memory Controller (rev a1)
00:01.0 ISA bridge: NVIDIA Corporation MCP61 LPC Bridge (rev a2)
00:01.1 SMBus: NVIDIA Corporation MCP61 SMBus (rev a2)
00:01.2 RAM memory: NVIDIA Corporation MCP61 Memory Controller (rev a2)
00:01.3 Co-processor: NVIDIA Corporation MCP61 SMU (rev a2)
00:02.0 USB controller: NVIDIA Corporation MCP61 USB 1.1 Controller (rev a3)
00:02.1 USB controller: NVIDIA Corporation MCP61 USB 2.0 Controller (rev a3)
00:04.0 PCI bridge: NVIDIA Corporation MCP61 PCI bridge (rev a1)
00:05.0 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation MCP61 High Definition Audio (rev a2)
00:06.0 IDE interface: NVIDIA Corporation MCP61 IDE (rev a2)
00:07.0 Bridge: NVIDIA Corporation MCP61 Ethernet (rev a2)
00:08.0 IDE interface: NVIDIA Corporation MCP61 SATA Controller (rev a2)
00:09.0 PCI bridge: NVIDIA Corporation MCP61 PCI Express bridge (rev a2)
00:0b.0 PCI bridge: NVIDIA Corporation MCP61 PCI Express bridge (rev a2)
00:0c.0 PCI bridge: NVIDIA Corporation MCP61 PCI Express bridge (rev a2)
00:0d.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation C61 [GeForce 6150SE nForce 430] (rev a2)
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 10h Processor HyperTransport Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 10h Processor Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 10h Processor DRAM Controller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 10h Processor Miscellaneous Control
00:18.4 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 10h Processor Link Control
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation G96 [GeForce 9500 GT] (rev a1)
03:00.0 SATA controller: JMicron Technology Corp. JMB363 SATA/IDE Controller (rev 03)
03:00.1 IDE interface: JMicron Technology Corp. JMB363 SATA/IDE Controller (rev 03)

That's the AMD 5000 dual core processor.

I have since the incident used Win8.1 and Win7 and LinuxMint16 Cinnamon virtual machines, and all work fine. I installed the LM16 AFTER the problem.

My hunch is that something freaky happened internally with VirtualBox when I attempted to install a 64bit machine on a 32bit platform, and killed the machine before VirtualBox declared a fault.... that is assuming it would have declared a fault.....but, by then, the '/' partition was full, and the whole machine froze.

owa

We never know what causes these things. I've attempted maybe 10 or so of 64 bit into 32 bit vm's without lockup. I now tend to name it with name64 or linux64 and it goes into a 64 bit client.

I suppose you could search bug reports on virtualbox for exact complaint. Problem there if you only get one bug report, it could be faulty. If you had 500 or so, you could expect it to be legit.


I can say I used to work at a large computer place. There are so many variables in the million different boards out there and million different power supplies and million different ram... well, you get the idea. Just too many things that can fail. This is why apple can claim quality, they control both OS and hardware.

Thanks, jefro. I've tried to duplicate the failure several times, stopping the mistaken install by Machine > Close > Power Off the Machine, and have NOT been able to recreate the problem. My best guess is that the machine did not fully power off on the event in question, and continued spewing stuff all while I attempted to install it again on the 64bit platform. It was a fluke. And I'm guessing again that it is not likely to happen again.
But, as I said, after 45 years of fixing things, I just couldn't let it go until I tried to get deeper into the cause of it. As you indicated above, with the almost infinite number of variables in hardware and the like infinity of variables in software interaction, I'll probably never get past this point. Even after all this time of working in my field, I still occasionally would encounter something which would make me exclaim, "Well, I'll be darned!!"
Perhaps if something like this would ever happen again, I might not have my superior exerting her pressure, giving me the luxury of digging deeper into it while the evidence is still there.

The fun part of Linux is the ability to get inside and see what's going on.

owa