VirtualBox hde: irq timeout: status=0x50 { DriveReady SeekComplete }

If you get the below error when trying to install Linux ( in my case Oracle Linux) through virtualbox on a windows machine then then the reason will probably be that the hard drive created for the virtual machine has been created as a SATA drive by default.

ide: failed opcode was: 0xef
hde:hde: irq timeout: status=0x50 { DriveReady SeekComplete }

Remove the image from SATA controller and add it under IDE controller to resolve the issue

 

 

Great tip from the folks at the virtualbox forum

https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=35106

 

**EDIT 19/05/2013**

Setting up your VM's under IDE is fine but limiting to 4 disks. In trying to create a 10g Cluster using multiple ASM disks i realised i was going to find another way around this problem.

 

To convert from IDE to SATA, boot the existing VM with the IDE disk, then force-add the SATA driver to a new boot image for the running kernel version as root

mkinitrd -v -f --with=ahci /boot/initrd-`uname -r`.img `uname -r`

 

(reference: https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/6293 )

 

Now before shutting down the machine, you will want to update your /boot/grub/grub.conf with the below to avoid the same errors as the start of this post.

 

Solution:

Add this line at the end of the kernal argument

before : "kernal /vmlinuz-2.6.9-78.EL ro root=/"

after : "kernal /vmlinuz-2.6.9-78.EL ro root=/ ide2=noprobe ide3=noprobe"

Getting Started with Oracle Data Integrator

Just before i finished for 2 weeks leave ( new arrival to the family last week) I had the opportunity to spend some time working with Oracle Data Integrator , ODI.

The challenge set was to help automate the loading of external XML files using ODI to start and then use its other functionalities in the future like exposing some of these processes as web services.

I had spent some time using the Oracle 'Getting Started' document : http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E28280_01/integrate.1111/e12641/toc.htm

I also purchased this book 'Getting Started with Oracle Data Integrator 11g: A Hands-On Tutorial' which was an excellent introduction into using ODI and even had a couple of sections on using XML.

Although my main responsiblity was to tackle the architecture and deployment of all the components, I'd spent some time playing and so was able to get involved with the early design solutions.

The next posts are going to cover deploying the components and then a few posts on using it to load data in from an XML file , from a database source to target, enriching the data ....