Hard disk unreadable after installing new physical drive

[hodgsr]

Hi,

I am running VirtualBox 3.2.0 under PCLinuxOS 2010 with Windows XP as the guest OS. This was all working fine until we added a new 1TB internal hard disk. After this, the virtual machine gave the following error:

Code: Select all

A disk read error has occured
Press ctrl+alt+del to restart

I figured that this might have something to do with the identities of sda/sdb etc being changed after installation, but even after removing the new hard disk, the error is persisting. The location of the .vdi itself has not changed.

Is there any way I can make the .vdi readable to VirtualBox again?

Thanks,

[Sasquatch]

Something happened to the virtual OS at the same time you shut down the computer to add the hard drive. It's nothing more than a coincidence. Adding a physical hard drive does nothing with a virtual system because it doesn't know what you do with the PC. For all it cares you dump it on a different system and it will boot without any problems whatsoever. The only change it sees is the CPU.
Make sure that the boot order is set correctly in the VM settings and that you don't have a floppy or other media attached that could interfere with hard drive booting.

[hodgsr]

Yeah, I've tried all those kind of things... I'm afraid I'm still a bit stuck!

I've gone through and checked all settings, but nothing i can see seems to work.

[MarkCranness]

Are any of these true:
1- You have taken a VirtualBox Snapshot of the VM?
There is a bug that can affects VMs created from a P2V image, which appears when a snapshot is taken.
See here: http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=33513

2- You have recently changed the size of the virtual disk (re-imaged it to a new virtual disk)?
Changing the size of the disk can cause VirtualBox to set a new geometry for the hard disk, which causes the boot loader to get confused, which causes the 'A disk read error has occured' error.
(This usually happens for a newly P2V'ed VM, NOT to an already running VM.)
See: http://fugitivethought.com/blog.php?act ... blog_id=77 ... and http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic. ... 95#p107595
 

[lombaardcj]

Hi,
Sorry to jump in here, but I have the same error message "A disk read error occurred" problem. Searching furiously for a solution and so far I have established.

Host is Ubuntu 10.04, Virtual Box v3.1.6
Virtual OS Windows 7

I tried loading a .vmi virtual disk from older version of Virtual Box v3.0.8 Ubuntu 9.04

My suspicion is that the .vmi file is incompatible with the newer version of VBox.

Could it be?

Is their a solution for my problem?