Help With Moving VM's

[Thallion]

I am relatively new to all of this but i have ventured from the shallow end so to speak & I need some advice. Please bear with me. I will describe my first problem with moving a VM & how I solved it. Then I need advice on avoiding the problem to start with.

I originally created my VM as simply a test to see if I could get it all to work. After following some tutorials, etc - I got it to work & installed my first working OS on a VM. Now I want to create a VM that I will be actually using. the problem is, I created it in the wrong default directory/drive. After some more research & guides, I have been able to make some of the changes but I am not actually able to move the virtual drive itself. Let me briefly outline what I did.

1) I removed the VM (right click remove only not delete)
2) I powered virtualbox down.
3) I moved the (4) files in the default machine directory for this VM to the directory of my choice (.vbox, ,vdmk, -flat.vmdk,.vbox-prev)
4) I reopened virtualbox - under preferences I changed the virtualbox default location of VM's to the folder I want all my VM's to be in. My VM is now in this directory.
5) I used the Machine / add option from the virtualbox menu. I choose the .vbox of the moved drive.

Everything seemed to look ok until I looked under the VM settings / storage. The actual hard drive had a yellow triangle on it. I moused over the drive & the tooltip told me that some snapshots were not accessable, etc. I undid everything & put the VM back into its original place. I opened virtualbox, deleted my one snapshot. Then I moved everything back & reset up my VM in the new location. Everything worked fine then. I even made a new snapshot & resored to it. It all looks ok now.

The original snapshot directory was in the wrong place. When I tried to change the location of them in settings, I got the warning - something about merging different snapshots of vms & that must delete them first before changing the default snapshot directory. So, everytime I move a VM, I will have to delete all my snapshots? If so, this presents some serious problems for me. Please advise.

[ChipMcK]

Moving a VM

[Thallion]

Looking to up your post count? If you read what I posted this is what I did but I was more verbose.

[socratis]

told me that some snapshots were not accessable, etc.

Unless you define "etc", there's not that much we can understand. Unless you tell us the exact paths of the main HD and its snapshots, we can only speculate...

So, everytime I move a VM, I will have to delete all my snapshots?

If you had everything together, and you followed the guide that ChipMcK correctly pointed you to, there would be no need to delete a snapshot, unless the VMDK had any extra information embedded. We don't usually deal with VMDKs, they're kind of foreign to VirtualBox, compared to its native VDI. You should get into that habit as well...


PS. Please don't come out judging ChipMcK on your first post, not cool. He has almost a thousand fold compared to you...