Windows guest freezes on saving, disk space problem

[gentle]

Hi guys,

My problem is this: I tried to save the machine, but it came up with errors referring to my disk having not enough space.
The machine doesn't power off, or save, or anyting. It just sits there, frozen.

Opening Virtualbox shows the machine as being Paused. But trying to resume it yields the error:

Failed to resume the execution of the virtual machine Windows.
Cannot resume the machine as it is not paused (machine state: Saving).

Code: Select all

Result Code: VBOX_E_INVALID_VM_STATE (0x80BB0002)
Component: Console
Interface: IConsole {6375231a-c17c-464b-92cb-ae9e128d71c3}

My question is: what to do next? Is there any chance of salvaging this?

[Perryg]

What ran out of disk space? The main drive or the virtual drive? What were the settings? IE: how big did you specify for the guests hard drive and how much did you have available?
Do you use snapshots?

[gentle]

The main drive ran out of space

virtual drive was set to 10GB

Snapshots used.

Log attached.

[Perryg]

Well this could be tricky. You need to see if you can free up some space where this can finish or at least get to a point that it aborts properly and does not stay in paused mode.
Just forcing a shutdown could corrupt the VirtualBox.xml file and make the VM useless. (Try backing this file up before you do anything else if at all possible)

[gentle]

I freed up about 80 gigs of space and I copied the xml file from ~/.Virtualbox (that's the one right?)

What would be the next thing to do?

[Perryg]

See if you can un-pause the VM and then shut it down.

[gentle]

the only un-pause option I have is to 'resume'. This yields the error mentioned in the opening post.

closing the still-open vm also fails, no errors there, just no response. The window still responds to resizing and minimizing (not scaling the windows guest).

[Perryg]

I don't know what else you can do. You could try clicking on the Machine tab at the top and send the ACPI shutdown command but I don't hold a lot of hope for that. As a last resort you might send the reset but this can be just as bad as rebooting the host. Nothing that you do is going to be that safe I am afraid. Snapshots and saved state take a lot of disk space and you really should keep an eye on it in the future. I hope you do save this VM, but at this point I have no other suggestions.

[gentle]

Hi Perryg

I've killed the session and restarted the VM, keeping my fingers crossed.
All seems pretty much o.k. Even stuff I changed just before I exited the VM is still there. I have to see how much damage there really is, but so far I'm pretty confident I'm in the clear.

BTW: The reason my disk was full, was because some torrents used up all of my space.

Thanks for the quick responses / help.

[roubesten]

I am seeing the same problem, and seeing no way out.

It seems rather unhelpful to conclude that someone just should have been more careful about available disk space before closing Virtual Box. Shouldn't the application do so? It should not leave you in a helpless state with no enabled options to resume after freeing more disk space, or to abort, or to continue running as you were, if a disk becomes full when shutting down.

[mpack]

It seems rather unhelpful to conclude that someone just should have been more careful about available disk space before closing Virtual Box. Shouldn't the application do so? It should not leave you in a helpless state with no enabled options to resume after freeing more disk space, or to abort, or to continue running as you were, if a disk becomes full when shutting down.

Sounds reasonable, but it's a bit more complicated than that.

For example, what do you mean by "the application"? VirtualBox simulates hardware, it is not part of the guest OS. In reality "the application" is actually a chain of somewhat independant applications, starting from the guest OS, guest drivers, then VBox virtual hardware and host application layers. The starting point, i.e. the guest OS, is not necessarily designed for hardware which has a mind of its own and only does what it's told sometimes. So any failure that is bounced back to the guest will probably be seen as a catastrophic hardware error, and there is only so much that can be done to avoid that... so yep, best to avoid this scenario.

Plus of course, much of the remedial action that VBox might take, such as suspending the OS with a core dump to host disk... is blocked due to not having any disk space for the dump.