virtualbox.org

After upgrading to 3.1.2, I took a snapshot of one of my VMs. Now, I want to delete the snapshot. I was able to successfully rollback to the snapshot, but when I try to delete it in the GUI I receive a failure message. The message doesn't indicate what specifically failed, so I tried using vboxmanage. No luck. Maybe someone out there can give me a hint how I can get the snapshot deleted.

kryon:MacOS flszen$ vboxmanage snapshot "Windows XP" delete 6d0cc36d-d907-442e-8a91-13555ecaf342
0%...FAILED
Error: snapshot operation failed. No error message available!


The VM does has one of each kind of hard disk type, normal, immutable, and writethrough.

Thanks!

flszen wrote:I was able to successfully rollback to the snapshot, but when I try to delete it in the GUI...

I don't understand why are you trying to achieve. You rollbacked to snapshot and now snapshot is your current state. I don't see a point of deleting snapshot if it is a current state. Have you tried to start a guest after you rollbacked to snapshot? I suggest you to do that and then shoutdown a PC and delete a snapshot. I see no point of deleting a snapshot if it is the same as current state. Have I missed something?

My goal is to delete the snapshot so VB won't have to bother with maintaining the differencing between the base machine and the snapshot. While it is true that I was able to rollback the changes to the point of the snapshot, any changes I make will be made within the snapshot, I don't want that.

I have booted the VM and shutdown, and am still unable to delete the snapshot.

Well, I ended up removing the snapshot manually from the XML file. I'm pretty sure it has something to do with having the immutable and writethrough disks attached, I remember having trouble with that before. Oh well. Maybe it'll work correctly in a later release.

flszen wrote:Well, I ended up removing the snapshot manually from the XML file. I'm pretty sure it has something to do with having the immutable and writethrough disks attached, I remember having trouble with that before. Oh well. Maybe it'll work correctly in a later release.

If you can reproduce the problem, I suggest you to report a bug to bugtracker: http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Bugtracker This is the only way problems can "work correctly in a later release".

FYI - I was able to duplicate this issue. I also have a VM with both an immutable and a writethrough image attached to it, and I could not delete (merge) a snapshot. After manually editing the XML file to remove these two images from both the snapshot and the parent snapshot, I was able to delete the snapshot OK.

Ticket #5727 in the bugtracker seems to be the problem we're having.

I'm having the same problem but might have a different explanation. After going to the xml file I noticed that the snapshot that I can't delete is missing the property "stateFile=" I also noticed that under the UI, this snapshot has a red box icon, (transport control for stop) instead of the normal green right arrow. I looked in the documentation but could not find reference for the exact meaning of this stop icon, or possible solutions if you encounter this.

I have no idea what could have happened to the .sav file that was associated with said snapshot, but it is not on my machine anywhere and know for certain I did not delete it. I'm chalking it up to a possible side effect of the many upgrades I've made since I started using the program. I know they have changed a good deal about the program, including how snapshots work, but of course I could be way off base on that assumption.

If anyone else runs into this problem, I would try to see if the "statefile=" reference is pointing to the proper .sav file, or any .sav file at all. You might be able to hand edit the xml to point to the proper file if it still exists on your machine. Personally, I haven't decided what course of action to take yet as the snapshot I want to delete is the root of all the rest of my snaps and am not confident that removing all reference to the snapshot from the xml will leave me without some data.loss.

For reference, the 3 drives I have attached are:
Disk 1: normal
Disk 2: normal
Disk 3: Writethrough

Eidolen

Yeah, I don't think I would try removing it if it was the root. I'm not sure how the differencing images work internally, but it doesn't sound like it would be very happy about that. If you have the disk space, you could back the whole thing up first and then try, though.