Importing Appliance backup Fails

[Agnemon]

Windows 10. 64 bit 16GB Ram.
Virtual Box 5.2.
C Drive 285 GB free of 465 GB (SSD).
Drive E 390 GB Free of 697 GB(Multiple Hard drives configured as a data space).

The Appliance backup (dated 2013) is 38.3 GB and consists of 16 disk files (ranging in size from 69,120 KB (disk 1) to 9,7GB (disk 5)) the "ovf" file and 2 ".mf" files.

The import gets to appro 47% then fails with this error message:

Failed to import appliance E:\Temp\appliance backup.ovf.

Could not create the imported medium 'C:\Users\Kim\VirtualBox VMs\Windows 8_\appliance backup-disk7.vmdk'.

VMDK: Compressed image is corrupted 'E:\Temp\appliance backup-disk7.vmdk' (VERR_ZIP_CORRUPTED).

Result Code: VBOX_E_FILE_ERROR (0x80BB0004)
Component: ApplianceWrap
Interface: IAppliance {8398f026-4add-4474-5bc3-2f9f2140b23e}

Is there anyway to restore the files seperately?

[mpack]

Appliances are not good backups. Good backups have the capacity for a bit for bit perfect restore, an OVF does not offer anything like that.

In any case your error seems straightforward: the VMDK is corrupted. Without knowing the nature of the corruption it's impossible to say whether the contents can be recovered. However, IME the usual "corruption" is truncation caused by an incomplete download or copying onto a FAT external drive, in which case there is no way to recover the lost parts of the image.

[Agnemon]

Ok, so if all else fails, CHEAT

What I did was run the import with the source set to a slow medium (NAS Server) and the destination to a fast medium (SSD) and as each VM finished unpacking I copied it to another directory. This allowed me to successfully recover the first 6 VM's (the 7th was corrupted). So, a partial success.

Would have been a lot easier if the process didn't clear the VM's and then show the error message.

[mpack]

I've never come across an appliance containing more than one VM. I assume you mean one VM, several disks. In fact checking back I hadn't noticed that you already mentioned 16 disks.

You don't need to import the appliance to access the disks, but neither should you try to use the compressed VMDKs directly. Your first post led me to believe that the appliance was already unpacked (if it had ever beein packed into an OVA at all), in which case all you need to is use "VBoxManage clonehd <infile.vmdk> <outfile.vdi> --format VDI" to unpack the compressed VMDK to a more usable VDI.

You could try this on disks 8..16 if they haven't been lost by truncation.

[Agnemon]

They are seperate VMs

Windows XP (7 VM's)
Windows 7 (3 VM's)
Ubuntu (1 VM)
Windows 3.11 (1 VM)
Windows 8 (1 VM corrupted)
Windows 95 (1 VM)
Windows 98 (2 VM's)

[Agnemon]

I cannot find any reference in manuals to the "clonehd" option. The closest that I can find is the "clonemedium" option, which will read the next disk in order (disk 8) but Virtualbox will not even see the output.vdi file.

[mpack]

clonehd and clonemedium are the same command.

I don't know what it means for VirtualBox to "see" a VDI. A VDI is a disk image, you need to mount it in a VM.