up vote 36 down vote favorite
11

I have recently been trying to install VirtualBox, when this message came up:

No bootable medium found!

Can somebody please tell me what went wrong?

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  • Check to make sure that you selected Linux and Ubuntu when you're creating the virtual machine. I chose Windows and it gave me this exact error. – Pikamander2 Oct 2 '17 at 1:34
  • 1
    I was so happy to see this message when I first ran VirtualBox. I thought "wow, that really is like a real-world computer!" – user334639 Oct 12 '17 at 0:05
  • I had to enable EFI on system motherboard tab for windows to work from a VHD. – Lanklaas Jun 28 at 6:58
up vote 35 down vote

This message simply means that you haven't told your virtual machine where to find its OS.

In the Virtual Machine window, go to Storage, and medium. see image below.

enter image description here

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  • 1
    It also gives the same error if you have specified the ISO or boot disk like this but it's an inappropriate one - for example I had this problem even after doing everything suggested here because by mistake I'd selected ubuntu-16.04.3-server-arm64.iso instead of ubuntu-16.04.3-server-amd64.iso (I should have used the amd64 version not the arm64 version) – user568458 Jan 2 at 19:19
up vote 4 down vote

I had this problem when I was trying to get my own VM up and running. I had downloaded a VDI file off of OSBoxes, and was attempting to use that to create a VM.

When you create your own VM, make sure that, when prompted for the creation of a Virtual Hard Disk, you select to use an existing virtual hard disk file. Then, locate the VDI file in your file system and select it. The picture below illustrates my point.

See the circled part

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up vote 2 down vote

Assuming you had created a virtual hard drive, and installed Ubuntu onto this drive as depicted in answers to the following question:

Then if you finished you installation, and removed your installation ISO from the virtual CD bay you should be able to boot from this hard drive.

This of course can only be done in case you had included this drive's image in the virtual box machine's "Storage" settings where you can attach the VDI image of your installation to either a virtual IDE, or a virtual SATA port:

enter image description here

In addition we need to make sure you had not disabled booting from your hard drive in the System > Boot Order settings of your virtual machine:

enter image description here

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up vote 1 down vote

if you have (as it seems to me to understand) installed virtualbox and created a vm in it, then you must configure it, network and storage, if your vm is brand new.

If you get no bootable medium, it means that in your vm both the HDU and the CDU are empty (it can mean too that your vm HDU hasn't any boot record or any OS on).

Cheers,

Silvia

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up vote 1 down vote

When you're first creating the Virtual Machine, be sure to choose Linux as the type and Ubuntu as the version.

enter image description here

I chose Windows by accident and it was giving me that error.

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