We have experienced a "black screen of death" after booting a CentOS virtual machine running on an Oracle VirtualBox. The screen is completely black, there is no mouse pointer. This seems to be related to upgrading the system, but we are not sure.
We've discovered that reinstalling guest additions and rebooting somehow fixes the problem. Here are the steps used to recover:
- boot the VM, the screen should be black.
- Ctrl + F2 -> a console login screen should be visible
- On virtual box menu, [Devices] -> Insert Guest Additions CD Image...
- Login to your linux system
- su (or use sudo whenever required)
- mkdir /media/cdrom
- mount /dev/sr0 /media/cdrom
- cd /media/cdrom
- sh VBoxLinuxAdditions.run uninstall
- sh VBoxLinuxAdditions.run install
- reboot
Since we now know how to recover from the black screen, this is not a big problem. Still, anyone knows why this happens and how to avoid it?