virtualbox.org

Good morning,

I am new to the usage of VM on windows. It took me a month to configure my newly setup VM for my project. All was fine till I went for a system restart of the host system. The system went in to restart without even warning me about the VM that was running in the background. Ideally the windows before restarting/shut down asks for safe exit of applications that are running but there was no action taken from the Oracle VM to ensure safe exit from the running VM.
The result is the that, the entire setup in the VM has crashed and and all data is lost. Not only that, now when I try to create a new VM, it does not work as expected and has become extremely slow(almost dead). Is there anyway I can recover my lost data in the VM (I have deleted all the images of the VM that I created as it was not working)?
I recommend that if there is any instance of the VM running in the system, the host system should not be allowed to go into restart/shut down mode unless it saves the current state of the VM.

I hope the your development team looks into this issue as this is big loss for the developers.

Thanks,
Saurabh.

This one has been discussed for a really long time, several years, and I'm sure the devs have tried every way to Sunday to figure out how to block Windows from shutting down when a guest is running, That they haven't shows that it cannot be done. Other programs might be able to do it, just not Virtualbox for some reason.

nairvoyance@gmail.com wrote:the entire setup in the VM has crashed and and all data is lost. Not only that, now when I try to create a new VM, it does not work as expected and has become extremely slow(almost dead)

There are a couple possible ideas to try. Start the guest from full power off, not save-state. Run until you see the problem happen, then shut down the guest from within the guest OS if possible. If not possible, close the Virtualbox window for the guest with the Power Off option set.

Please right-click the guest in the main Virtualbox window's guest list, choose Show Log. Save the far left tab's log, zip the log file, and post the zip file, using the forum's Upload Attachment tab.

nairvoyance@gmail.com wrote:the host system should not be allowed to go into restart/shut down mode unless it saves the current state of the VM.

Good idea, if it can be caught, and the host doesn't power off before the guest is fully handled. Change the host shutdown procedure so you find it harder to turn off the computer before checking that a guest is running. Also, back up the guest regularly, and the host too, in a way that has been tested as restorable. Data that is not restorably backed up is not important.

Personally, I haven't experienced any auto-update restarts in Windows 10 for over 2 years, possibly largely down to the constant pressure put on Microsoft Developers by the Windows Insider Community's constant demands for more user control over the update process, because of the high level of risk of data loss/corruption as Windows 10 couldn't, by design, be prevented from rebooting by deliberate third party (software-in-use) intervention.

In my experience, there now seems to be an adequacy of Windows 10 built-in features which can be used to both control the application of updates and inhibit auto-restarts, providing Update settings are correctly configured. First there's the simplicity of setting Active Hours to prevent auto-restarts during defined working hours; then there are also various additional 'Advanced' Update settings which offer additional update controls and/or the display of restart required warnings; and, finally, there's the 'nuclear' option of 'switches' which can completely prevent auto-updates for specified periods, but which can also be overridden by manually applying updates at convenient times.