VMDK vs. VDI and other basic questions

[chuckbo]

I feel like I should be able to figure these questions out by reading the manual, but maybe it's too late.

I'm trying to figure out where my virtual machine's hard drive is -- why it seems like I have two of them.
I have one virtual machine, and it's called Vista - Clean. It uses a hard drive called Vista - Clean. The info when I select it says that it uses Vista - Clean.vdi. Great, that's what I expected, and it's in a folder called Windows. It's about 18.8GB in size, and it was last changed two days ago.

I also have a file called Vista - Clean.vmdk. It's only 18.7GB in size and hasn't changed since June. What's odd is it's the Library\VirtualBox\HardDisks folder. I'd like to delete it, but before I do that, I'd like to know that VirtualBox doesn't need it. My intuition says it's okay to delete it since the Sun VirtualBox window only lists the vdi file -- but I'd like someone here who knows better to offer their opinion.

I also have a question about making a test copy of my drive & virtual machine. Is it possible to just copy the vdi file in the Finder with a new name and then create a new virtual machine and reference that copied drive?

Chuck

[vbox4me2]

What about renaming them? you should get nice errors things are missing and from there figure out where's who.

[chuckbo]

That's my plan if I don't get any feedback.
The only thing is then I don't learn anything about them, only whether they're necessary.

[hank]

So, did you try it? What happened?

(I think it works like the first penguin off the ice finds out if there are killer whales waiting, and the rest benefit from the information obtained by the volunteer)

I'm utterly new at this myself and hoping not to have to break things to figure out they are needed, in case that causes some problem I can't fix by re-renaming the files.

Really Totally Fine Manual, I must admit, lots and lots to read there, I'm reading it several times, up to v4.0.2 today. So unless you've gone to v4, make clear if your advice or experience is from the older v3.

[Perryg]

@hank,
What do you need to know? Do you have an issue that you need help with?