VM creation using VirtualBox Issue: "FATAL: No bootable medium found! System halted."

Have you came across below error while trying to start your newly created Virtual Machine (VM) using Oracle VM VirtualBox :

The error states that : FATAL: No bootable medium found! System halted.

This error message tells us two things:

• No bootable medium found: we haven't specified the Guest OS for our Virtual Machine (VM) while configuring the VM system configurations. 
• System halted: in absence of an OS, how can any system start, that's why our VM system is halted.

This article is kind of How To Guide to show the steps with screenshots to fix the above issue.

Assumptions

• VM is already created using Oracle VM VirtualBox Manger Wizard by choosing appropriate parameters like
• OS Type eg. Microsoft Windows, Linux, Solaris, BSD, IBM OS/2, Mac OS X  etc.
• Version specific to OS Type eg. for Linux, we have Ubuntu, Gentoo, Red Hat etc.
• Memory Size in MB eg. for CentOS, at least 768MB for a graphical install to work
• Virtual Hard Drive eg. for CentOS, the OS disk should be at least 8GB. For a relatively full install, allocate at least 15GB
• Oracle VM VirtualBox Manger Wizard is open.

Misunderstanding

One may misunderstood that specifying the OS Type & Version while creating the new VM would automatically install the desired Guest OS on the VM. But this is not the case, one need to explicitly specify the desired Guest OS, they would like to install on the VM. 

The root cause of the above issue is that we have forgotten to specify the desired Guest OS for our VM.

Resolution

Step 1: Right click on the desired VM and choose Setting... option to open the VM setting window
Step 2: Go to Storage, and add an empty CD/DVD drive to the IDE Controller if it's not there by clicking on the CD icon and choosing Leave empty button in the opened dialogue box. 

Note: For newly created VM, empty CD/DVD drive is automatically created and attached to the IDE Controller. 
Step 3: Select the empty CD/DVD drive under IDE Controller and click on the CD icon on the right to pick Choose a virtual CD/DVD disk file... option from the list. Now navigate to the directory where ISO images reside and pick the desired Guest OS ISO file for example CentOS-7-x86_64-DVD-1611.iso or CentOS-7-x86_64-Minimal-1611.iso

That's it, we are done. Now our VM will find the required bootable medium i.e Guest OS ISO file.

Thank you for reading this article. Hope you could now successfully start your new VM with desired Guest OS using Oracle VM VirtualBox. If you have any suggestion or have any question do let me know in the comment box. Happy Learning!!