Black screen on VM after moving Harddisk and Machine folders

[mlchris2]

Im running Windows 7 64 bit and have two vm's setup; Win7 32 bit and Win7 64 bit. I moved the harddisk and machine folders from C:\Users\username\.VirtualBox to C:\.Virtualbox. I did this becuase I use Roaming Profiles here at work and a 40GB profile is just insane to load/upload each day.

After I copied the HardDisks and Machines data to the new location (I kept the default \.VirtualBox\VirtualBox.xml file where it was.) I started VirtualBox. Much to my suprise my two vm's were not listed. So I just recreated them. I then renamed the old .vdi files with the new vm name and modified the machine XML files with the UUID. I then used the Virtual Media Manager to import the old VDI's, Restarted VirtualBox and the machines appear as they did before with "powered off" status.

now when I start either vm... I get just a plain black screen with a cursor in the upper left corner. It doesnt boot into Windows.

What did I do? Do I have to rebuild the vm's from scratch or is there something i can do?

MC

[vbox4me2]

The VM settings are not the same as before, compare the xml's.

[mpack]

In my experience, black screen usually means that the IO APIC setting is not as it was before.

[mlchris2]

Interesting.... I was under a deadline to get some testing done and just recreated the vm's from scratch.

[mpack]

I was under a deadline to get some testing done and just recreated the vm's from scratch.

Nothing wrong with that, but with any Windows guest you need to make very sure that you get the VM settings exactly the same as they were before, otherwise you are asking for trouble (BSODs, activation messages etc).