Infected Guest OS What' Best Practice to Reinstall Guest OS?

[Sands]

Hi Guys,

I infected a Guest OS.

I want to replace it.

What best practice for doing so?

Do I use settings and delete?

Do I reformat my VB Disk?

OR Do I need to reinstall VB?

[mpack]

There is no need to reinstall VB, I assume that only the guest is infected.

Create a new VDI, mount that in the VM (instead of, i.e. replacing the infected VDI), then reinstall the guest OS. Unregister then delete the infected VDI later. In future keep backup copies of your VDIs so you can easily revert.

Personally I keep "raw" VMs handy with guest OS installed but no software. I make a clone of this when I want to try out software that I'm suspicious of. If problems were to occur then I could easily delete the clone, and not have hassle with reinstallation, Windows activation etc.

[Sands]

Thanks mpcak!

I did reinstall and copy the .vdi , in case I tweak it up again.

By RAW VM's you mean just the guest with only a OS?

Do you create more than one?

What is take a snapshot?

Are the VMs typically faster than the hosts' OS because they have so much less garbage on them?

[mpack]

By RAW VM's you mean just the guest with only a OS?

Yes, that plus the OS is tweaked the way I like it (unwanted options and services turned off etc). You could also install a bare number of small apps - but the smaller the raw VDI is, the easier it is to clone. A lot of "essential" tools are not actually necessary on every single VM.

Do you create more than one?

Certainly, whenever I want to install something that I don't want to install on my host, I'll create a clone and install it there instead.

What is take a snapshot?

A snapshot is a VBox feature that works a bit like creating a restore point in Windows. But, I don't trust restore points. And I don't trust snapshots either, but for entirely different reasons: in my mind snapshots are too fragile, check out the various threads where users have lost their entire VM because one snapshot in the chain got zapped. A clone is stand alone and hence much more robust (especially if I have a backup of the important ones). That's another reason by the way: it's much easier to restore a damaged clone from a backup than it is to restore a damaged snapshot chain.

Are the VMs typically faster than the hosts' OS because they have so much less garbage on them?

Not in my case, because I don't let garbage build up on my host either. On the other hand my XP VMs do boot up and shut down much faster than my XP real hosts do, and I don't really know why.