virtualbox.org

I was running virtualbox 4.3.40 on linux mint 17.3 Rosa x64 cinnamon and the boot partition became corrupted due to a hard drive failure. I cloned the drive to a new one, but the boot partition was unrecoverable. As a result I installed linux mint 18.2 Sonya x64 cinnamon in its place.

My data partition was undamaged, which holds my virtial machines. I installed virtualbox 5.0.40 from the mint repository, but I am finding that my virtual machines are not being listed. What do I need to do to access my virtual machines? Am I going to have to uninstall 5.0.40 and install 4.3.40 from old releases? Is there a utility to modify the virtual machines to work with 5.0.40 as necessary?

Dave

Not a "Using VirtualBox" question. Moving to Linux Hosts.

Your list of registered VMs is stored in VirtualBox.xml, the VMs themselves are stored in a "VirtualBox VMs" folder on the user data path. In both cases that data is only visible to the correct user. I suspect that recovering your damage involved creating a new user account.

No matter, the VirtualBox.xml file isn't that important these days. Just make sure that your VM folders are fully accessible from your current account, and add back the .vbox files one at a time using "Machine|Add..." in the UI.

Incidentally, if you "installed VirtualBox from the Mint repo" then you aren't using VirtualBox, you're using a fork. Which means we can't support you here. You have to go to the Mint forums.

Thanks for the response. I did manage to get things working by uninstalling virtualbox, copying over ~/.config/VirtualBox/* from the damaged drive and then reinstalling virtualbox. I had copied the virtual machine directory only originally, which caused the first install to build a new configuration directory and missed my previous one.

I guess I will have to see about adding your repository to my configuration and upgrading to a supported version.

Dave