virtualbox.org

If I understand correctly the steps to clone a VM are:
1) VBoxMange clonehd
2) Register it to VirtualBox (File|Virtual Media Manager|Add) create new VM and mounted clone drive

>> start's up but doesn't completely boot <<

Ubuntu is sometimes configured to mount a particular drive - identified by UUID - on boot. Your cloned drive must have a different UUID, otherwise you won't be able to register it on the same host as your original. That means you may need to fix the boot config. If Ubuntu is configured to boot from a particular IDE or SATA channel then that will not have changed and you won't see this problem.

How do I change UUID?

Thanks
Danny

What version of Ubuntu is this?

If you find that you need to change the uuid of the version (and I have never had to do this when I cloned a vm) you would start on recover / single user mode and then drop to the CLI. Then you would need to change to the directory and edit the grub file. Not that easy for a new user but it is doable. Older versions or Ubuntu were easier but since grub2 you need to edit the file and then you need to run configure-grub. Depending on the version of Ubuntu though I think that they may be a different problem.

If Ubuntu is configured to boot from a particular IDE or SATA channel then that will not have changed and you won't see this problem.

Instead of blowing out the energy to see what happened why not try this CloneVDI Tool I use it all the time and it works great.

The easiest way to clone a VM. I found that the easiest way was to export appliance and than import appliance.

Danny