What is the configuration of your metal box and what is the host OS?
What is the configuration of your VM, under VirtualBox?
Also which HAOS image did you download?
Does a reboot of the VM help? Sometime when they say “system is not ready” they really mean that. You just have to give it sometime. First time booting up the VM would take a while.
And I bet you have more on your screen than that single line error message. What else is on the console screen?