"host: can't find smbios entry point"

mailmichael — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 20:59:08 GMT

I just resized my disk using the expand and then use gpartd to repair the gpt in the Linux guest. Upon existing gpartd, it recommended rebooting so the kernel would reload the partition. Now when I restart the guest, the screen spins for a while with "Waiting for connection." and then the screen goes blank. Near the end of vmware.log is the host error "host: can't find smbios entry point". From the behavior of the system, this error must mean it is unable to load the bios. Attempting to force bios setup upon restart results in the same failure, thus it doesn't appear to be related to the expanding of the disk.

The disk went from 300GB to 400GB in size.

With respect to the vmware.log file, the only issue possibly related is "AHCI: Tried to enable/disable IO space." shows up a couple times.

Any ideas on how to resolve this issue?

Edit: I did find this to be interesting. In an older log (likely post disk expansion but pre-gdisk fix of gpt), I got the following differences in a couple places:

newest vmware.log: <, older vmware.log >

< In(05) vmx DISK: Opening disks took 37 ms.
---
> In(05) vmx DISK: Opening disks took 43 ms.

< In(05) vmx DISKUTIL: (null) : max toolsVersion = 0, type = 0
< In(05) vmx DISKUTIL: Offline toolsVersion = 0, type = 0
...
---
> In(05) vmx DISKUTIL: scsi0:0 : max toolsVersion = 11269, type = 4
> In(05) vmx TOOLS setting legacy tools version to '11269' type 4, manifest status is 9

Both logs have the "vcpu-0 Host: can't find host SMBIOS entry point" entry, so this error could be a red herring.

Re: "host: can't find smbios entry point"

mailmichael — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 21:32:50 GMT

I figured this out on my own.

The reason the screen is blank could be due to Display settings unsupported by the BIOS or grub. I dumb downed my display settings, and now I can see the bios and grub boot. Grub is failing to read the (hd0) partition table. I'll be digging into this next, though not a vmware issue at this point. At least I can now boot off a CDROM and use gparted to see the partition table is recoverable. I just need to figure out how to get grub to see it.

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"host: can't find smbios entry point"

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