VDI: Invalid pre-header

[rstewart]

I stood up a new guest on my Mac OS X host (I'm running 3.2.8) for Linux Mint (Debian Edition) yesterday, and the install, etc., worked fine. I was working in the guest this morning and twice the guest "crashed" for lack of a better word and the status on the VirtualBox window for that guest was listed as "Aborted". After the first crash, the guest started without any problems. After the second crash, I received the following error when I tried to start the guest:

Failed to open a session for the virtual machine Linux Mint (Debian Edition).
Could not open the medium '/Users/Shared/vm/LMDE.vdi'.
VDI: invalid pre-header in '/Users/Shared/vm/LMDE.vdi'
(VERR_VD_VDI_INVALID_HEADER).
VD: error VERR_VD_VDI_INVALID_HEADER opening image file
'/Users/Shared/vm/LMDE.vdi' (VERR_VD_VDI_INVALID_HEADER).

Details:
Result Code: NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005)
Component: Medium
Interface: IMedium {1d578f43-5ef1-4415-b556-7592d3ccdc8f}

The other VMs (I have 3: 2 other Linux VMs and a Win7 VM that I use almost every day) seem to be fine so far.

Any thoughts on how to fix this, or whether the VM is completely gone, and what might have caused this? It's the first time in 2+ years of using VirtualBox I've lost a VM...

[mpack]

Have you rebooted your host since the second VM crash? That sort of error message on a file can be the result of the OS thinking the file is still opened for exclusive access by the app which crashed. VBox has no need to ever rewrite the pre-header after it is first created, so I don't see how it could genuinely get corrupted, VBox crash or no (and from your description it isn't clear to me if you're saying that VBox crashed, or you just got an error from the guest).

[rstewart]

@mpack: Thx for the quick follow-up.

In answer to your question, no -- I haven't restarted the host and I didn't restart VBox itself between the crashes. And as clarification, VBox itself didn't crash in either case, just the guest. I'm off on a different box right now, but later today or tomorrow, I will see if the guest itself will restart.

This is new territory for me, as I've never had issues with either VBox or one of the guests crashing to this point in the time I've used it. It has been rock-solid to this point, so to have one of the guests crash twice within an hour was more than a little surprising.

[rstewart]

@mpack: I've restarted both VirtualBox and the host system; same error. It would appear that the guest VM is toast...