Hi, I have done some more investigation on this problem: http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/7368 I have disabled and enabled various drivers by trial and error and found that the driver "gdth" is responsible for the boot delay of several seconds. So something is wrong with the combination VirtualBox + "gdth". Otherwise everything seems to be working in my VirtualBox machine now. -- Mit freundlichen Grüßen Jens Mühlenhoff