Problem:

Another thing which went wrong porting my Debian etch installation to a VirtualBox image is grub not handling 256 byte inode size of ext3 filesystems. I used a Debian lenny ISO to partition the virtual HDD, so per default it was created with an inode size of 256 bytes. Then I dumped the data. Previously, Debian etch used standard 128 byte inode size. I noticed this when booting the ported image:

Searching for GRUB installation directory … found: /boot/grub
The file /boot/grub/stage1 not read correctly.

Solution:

This is a known bug in older Debian installations. grub 0.97 cannot support inode sizes greater than 256 bytes. So I had to either recreate the partition with proper settings or update grub. I ended up with upgrading Debian to lenny, and everything is working smoothly, at least for a while.