Restoring from differencing images

[NV]

Hey, new to the forum, so please bear with me. Here are the details of my environment:

Host - Ubuntu 12.04
Client - Windows 7, 32 bit

This windows VM got recently messed up by an Avast antivirus update, that rendered the logins into the Windows VM useless.

So this is where I think I messed up. I attached the VDI's (2 of them - one root and one secondary drive) to another VM to extract the data, but I made a mistake and attached the Base VDI. Seeing that all the data files in the attached VDI was from 2014, I reattached them to the old VM to do a clone that included all the snapshots. The wierd part is that now when I started the Old VM with the reattached VDI's, it went to the windows login screen, with no error, but would not accept the pw anyway.

Several questions are swirling around......

Does reattaching the VDI back to the old machine somehow break the chain with the existing snapshots? Why is the login screen not giving me an error now that is did before the original detachment?

Looking through the snapshots folder, I saw several snapshot files. The last actual snapshot that I took using the VirtualBox manager was a while ago, but I saw a snapshot file that was date and time stamped just before the crash.

So I downloaded CloneVDI which says that you can clone from a snapshot, and tried to restore from that point. CloneVDI came back and said 'This is a differencing file and can not clone from this'. Or something to that effect. Pretty much every snapshot file I chose said the same thing.

So I am open to suggestions as I am confused as to what I should try next. Thank you for reading this long post and any ideas are welcome.

[NV]

Oh and one more thing - Which directory do I place the base VDI's in to make sure that the CloneVDI is not missing them? Is that the same directory as the snapshots I pasted to or do I have to mimic the old file structure? Maybe that's why I am getting the failure to clone from Clonevdi?

[socratis]

Which directory do I place the base VDI's in to make sure that the CloneVDI is not missing them? Is that the same directory as the snapshots I pasted to or do I have to mimic the old file structure?

From the CloneVDI release notes (emphasis mine):

If you select a snapshot (child) VDI file as the source then CloneVDI will scan the remaining VDI files in the same folder to see where they fit in the snapshot chain. Also, if the folder happens to be called "Snapshots" then the parent folder will also be scanned, and any VDI files found there will receive similar treatment.