Ubuntu Core VMWare install fails - SCSI not recognized, NVMe so là là, SATA stable

device
21

done

22

I’ve finally been able to get some testing done (I didn’t have vmware available before).

  1. When creating the Virtual Machine you need to choose “Custom” rather than “Typical”.
  2. Accept the default of LSI Logic for the SCSI controller (we won’t be using this).
  3. Finally, on the create or choose a disk image page, select use an existing image and set its interface to “SATA”.

This process successfully boots for me using VMWare Workstation 15.5.

VMWare prompted me to upgrade the format of my VMDK image the first time I started the VM, but that is likely due to the qemu-img utility, that I used to convert the .img to .vmdk, creating an older format.

2 Likes
23

If anyone else hits this issue, which actually will manifest slightly differently these days with a message like this:

the-tool[375]: error: Failed to make path /dev/disk/by-partuuid/9696c9f0-4343-4d23-b345-b2e819c84b2 absolute: No such file or directory 
[FAILED] Failed to start the-tool.service.

A more fool-proof way to diagnose what kernel module/driver is needed is to boot a working image (like the live ubuntu classic image mentioned here), and then follow instructions from https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/125272, essentially asking the kernel directly what module was loaded for the disk. Then file a bug against either initramfs-tools for Ubuntu Core 16 / Ubuntu Core 18, or ubuntu-core-initramfs for Ubuntu Core 20.