kees0_15 wrote:Also using Gparted to enlage the my first partition is risky:
Not really. Just make a backup of the VM folder before you start.
Did you overcome the problem with the corrupted .vbox file? Because nothing much can be done with your snapshots until you have a working control file.
Snapshots are not backups! Not in any sense of the word. Snapshots allow you to have convenient access to multiple alternate states of the guest OS, and that is all they do. They are of no help if you want to recover an earlier (working) state of the HOST, which is what you are trying to do here. What's worse the complexity of snapshots ensures that data loss on the host is more likely, because there are more files to damage and they must all be mutually consistent. A snapshot chain is like a patch chain. You have a base VDI, then the first (oldest) snapshot has data on how to patch the base to obtain the state #1. The second oldest snapshot contains data on how to patch state #1 to get state #2... and so on. If you zap an early state file then the entire chain is lost from that point onwards.
Incidentally, another reason not to use snapshots is that they can be huge. Each one can potentially grow to the full creation size of the hard disk, so a 30GB drive plus 10 snapshots could potentially grow to 330GB, and all of it has to be online.
One thing you can try is to identify the newest snapshot and attempt to clone it with
CloneVDI. This is a Win32 app, but it also runs under Wine on Linux hosts. Note that you clone the snapshot, not the base. Whichever snapshot you pick, CloneVDI works out the chain back to the base VDI and creates a merged clone, so it's up to you to find the newest snapshot CloneVDI will accept. CloneVDI can also resize the virtual disk for you. You must then mount that clone in a new VDI, you cannot replace a snapshot chain with a merged clone.
