VM in-accessible with medium is already in use by this snapshot error

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prash
Posts: 3
Joined: 4. Jan 2023, 05:35

VM in-accessible with medium is already in use by this snapshot error

Post by prash »

Hi,

I have been using Oracle VM 6.1 and suddenly it stopped working as the VM became inaccessible due to below error.
annot attach medium 'C:\Users\langadep\VirtualBox VMs\Lubuntu 20.04 Template\Lubuntu 20.04 Template-disk001.vdi' {2f88a795-2aa0-4cf2-a2ea-8529f098ecfb} from snapshot 'ac1f5e36-087e-4424-a818-c30dcffbef97': medium is already in use by this snapshot!.
All the options like Details, Snapshots and Logs are greyed out.

I am attaching the vbox file contents in the zip format.

Appreciate if you can provide some assistance. Please let me know if you need any more details. Thanks,
Files.zip
Zip file containing Lubuntu 20.04 Template.vbox file
(3.04 KiB) Downloaded 5 times
prash
Posts: 3
Joined: 4. Jan 2023, 05:35

Re: VM in-accessible with medium is already in use by this snapshot error

Post by prash »

Hi,

Can anyone please help with this? I have tried almost everything mentioned on the various links for the last few days but no luck yet.

Thanks,
mpack
Site Moderator
Posts: 39156
Joined: 4. Sep 2008, 17:09
Primary OS: MS Windows 10
VBox Version: PUEL
Guest OSses: Mostly XP

Re: VM in-accessible with medium is already in use by this snapshot error

Post by mpack »

Most experienced users avoid snapshots, as they serve no useful purpose and are very fragile.

In your case you seem to have created a linked clone and then built snapshots on top of that, so the fragility covers multiple interdependent VMs. It's not really possible to work out the dependencies from here - you'll have to draw your own map.

I can tell you that the .vbox file you provided does not contain a hard disk media registry, all of the media (except for the GAs ISO) appears to be registered by some other VM, which is what makes me assume this must have started as a linked clone. I'm not sure of this, but I can't think of what else you could have done to cause this mess.

In future I suggest you make sure that every VM is independent, and make actual backups.

For this I would restore the last known working state from a backup, and then make an independant clone.
prash
Posts: 3
Joined: 4. Jan 2023, 05:35

Re: VM in-accessible with medium is already in use by this snapshot error

Post by prash »

Thanks for your help. Really appeciate.

This time i created a new VM using same .vdi file. Although i lost my snapshot changes, I am happy to set it up again fresh instead of playing around with the old VM due to time uncertainty of restoration.

Thanks,
BillG
Volunteer
Posts: 5102
Joined: 19. Sep 2009, 04:44
Primary OS: MS Windows 10
VBox Version: PUEL
Guest OSses: Windows 10,7 and earlier
Location: Sydney, Australia

Re: VM in-accessible with medium is already in use by this snapshot error

Post by BillG »

To ensure easy successful restorations back up the entire file for the vm. Do not rely on a snapshot.
Bill
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