virtualbox.org

I just upgraded from Intrepid to Jaunty. Virtualbox, which was working fine under Intrepid, now fails when I try to start my XP virtual machine. The installed version of virtualbox is

ii virtualbox-2.2 2.2.4-47978_Ubu Sun VirtualBox

The error (xxxx is the uuid) is:

Unable to restore the virtual machine's saved state from '/home/rmcd/.VirtualBox/Machines/Windows XP/Snapshots/xxxx.sav'. It may be damaged or from an older version of VirtualBox. Please discard the saved state before starting the virtual machine (VERR_SSM_LOAD_CPUID_MISMATCH).

I'm not sure how to proceed. I deleted the latest snapshot but the next earliest snapshot gives the same error. I would hate to rebuild the machine from scratch. Is there a way to boot XP cold, bypassing the snapshots of running machines?

Given the CPUID mismatch error I experimented with taskset to change the CPU affinity but this didn't fix the problem.

Pointers and suggestions greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Bob

Check http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/3984 which might give you some insight on the error. It's about saved states, not snapshots. You don't specify the exact situation, if you use only snapshots, or also saved states.

CPU mismatch, however, can be caused by several cases. One is that you try to restore the VM stage on a different system, which has a different ID. Another cause can be CPU throttling. If you save the state of the VM when it's in power saving, and restore it when it's in full power mode, that can cause a different ID.

Thank you. I was using both saved states (is it possible to have more than one??) and snapshots. For some reason your post made me think about exporting the VM and by doing that I was able to restart and recover all but the snapshot I had discarded.

If one has a saved state and one or more snapshots, is there a way (other than by exporting and importing) to start from a powered off state? I have been attempting to RTFM, but there's a lot I'm not clear about.

Thanks again.

When the VM is in saved state, the Discard button (yellow arrow pointing down) will be enabled. It's next to the Start button. You don't have to export and import anything, nor discard snapshots from the Snapshots tab. All you do with the discard button, is clear the 'hibernate' state. Same thing that you can do to Windows that is in hibernate, and you hit a key before it starts to resume from it, and select "Continue without resume" or similar from the menu you get. Or even better, the system is in standby, and you just pull the power cord .

Ah, thank you. Very helpful.

So this is actually a good example of what I find confusing. It appears that there are actually three different "discard" actions? There is the big yellow button (which doesn't tell you what it is going to discard -- I assumed it would discard the entire virtual machine), there is the right-click on the current state and the right-click on a snapshot, each of which corresponds to a different keystroke. Not obvious.

Anyway, thank you again!