Greeting vlakvark,

Zonking zorillas ! I really like your moniker.

Your conjecture that the Knoppix installer has trouble writing to the virtual box hardware certainly sounds plausible.

Can I confirm a few (obvious, I sorry) things:

- you are using Knoppix 6.4.3 as both host and guest OS
- both use 32-bit kernels (you're not trying to run a 64-bit guest on a 32-bit host)
- both use the Virtual Box version that comes with Knoppix (you haven't installed the latest and greatest off the web)
- you are using the guest extensions in the guest OS
- you haven't recompiled these

- when you say HDD install you mean that and are not confusing that with USB flash install
- you have installed to a real HDD and not to a USB stick (unbranded USB sticks can be a real menace)

- what file system does the guest OS think it on the disk (ext3 I guess) ?
- what file system does the host OS think the virtual drive is on (I hope not ntfs) ?

- in VirtualBox is the virtual disk attached to an IDE controller or a SATA controller ?

- how much memory does the virtual machine have and how much does the host have and have you run the memory test on both ?

- could you explain what you mean by 'manually' replace broken application binaries ?

- boot your virtual machine from DVD and do a fsck on the virtual disk. Is it OK ?
- to md5sum on a few binaries / shared libraries on both the virtual disk and the DVD and see if they are the same.