Restoring my virtual machines

[Paul Abrahams]

I've reinstalled most of my Kubuntu system, but I have a partition where I had been keeping my VirtualBox files. I've been trying to reinstall those files using VBoxManage, but I get an error that I don't know how to get past. The following transcript should show the situation:

Code: Select all

pwa@Lepiota:/VirtualBoxImages$ ls -l
total 24
drwx------ 2 root root 16384 2008-07-03 01:09 lost+found
drwxr-xr-x 4 pwa  pwa   4096 2009-02-19 20:41 Machines
drwxr-xr-x 2 pwa  pwa   4096 2009-02-19 20:30 VDI
pwa@Lepiota:/VirtualBoxImages$ cd Machines
pwa@Lepiota:/VirtualBoxImages/Machines$ ls -l
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 3 pwa pwa 4096 2009-02-16 20:19 Windows 2000 Pro
drwxr-xr-x 3 pwa pwa 4096 2009-02-19 20:44 Windows XP Ultimate
pwa@Lepiota:/VirtualBoxImages/Machines$ ls -l Windows\ 2000\ Pro/
total 16
drwxr-xr-x 2 pwa pwa 4096 2009-02-16 20:19 Logs
-rw------- 1 pwa pwa 4416 2009-02-18 11:38 Windows 2000 Pro.xml
-rw------- 1 pwa pwa 3870 2009-02-16 20:19 Windows 2000 Pro.xml.1.3-linux.bak
pwa@Lepiota:/VirtualBoxImages/Machines$ VBoxManage registervm "Windows 2000 Pro"/
VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 2.1.4
(C) 2005-2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
All rights reserved.

[!] FAILED calling a->virtualBox->OpenMachine(Bstr(a->argv[0]), machine.asOutParam()) at line 762!
[!] Primary RC  = NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005) - Operation failed
[!] Full error info present: true , basic error info present: true
[!] Result Code = NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005) - Operation failed
[!] Text        = Could not lock the settings file '/home/pwa/.VirtualBox/Windows 2000 Pro' (VERR_FILE_NOT_FOUND)
[!] Component   = Machine, Interface: IMachine, {ea6fb7ea-1993-4642-b113-f29eb39e0df0}
[!] Callee      = IVirtualBox, {339abca2-f47a-4302-87f5-7bc324e6bbde}

When I started out, ~/.VirtualBox was empty.

What should I do?

[vbox4me2]

Print the machine xml files and start from scratch with whats in each xml, you can register the VDI files and then attach them to your new VM's.

[Paul Abrahams]

Part of the problem is that I don't have any machine.xml files -- at least none that I can locate. Is there a way, perhaps, to recreate them for some other VM and then edit them?

[vbox4me2]

Stop thinking and just do as suggested, recreate VM's, edit values as you remember and attach VDI's. These machine xml files do nothing other then set VM runtime settings, the VDI is the important one. If you can't remember any setting register the VDI as immutable until they boot normal.

[Paul Abrahams]

The file I needed, I discovered, was /VirtualBoxImages/Machines/Windows 2000 Pro/Windows 2000 Pro.xml. I tried to register that one and got a different error, a complaint that some vdi's were attached. So I copied that xml file, edited out the references to the vdi's, and then was able to register it. Once I had registered it I was able to put the .vdi's back again. So I'm on the air now!

Thanks to all.