You seem to have a talent to pick the one VM system that has (for obvious reason) probably the worst possible Linux support.
Having said this, I've just done a quick test with a few different parameters: using a WinXP host, booting TC 3.8.4 from a CD-ROM image in a VirtualPC VM with 256 MBytes RAM and running my own little
chroot setup script I was not able to re-produce your finding.
Obviously I don't know know how you've set up your 'chroot', and what you intend to do whitin it. Maybe you could use my little script as a test to see whether you get a different result.
Other then this I come back to my usual advice in these matters: using QEMU or VirtualBox has pretty much never let me down (and I tend to boot multiple TC VMs of either "flavour" every day either on a WinXP or a Linux host).