I'm an idiot and i've f'd up my VM. pls help

[y2k1]

Ok so i'm on my laptop and my C drive memory is just 70gb and I allocated allot to the VM-too much, anyway i was getting errors that the host had too little memory and I had to close it down and so i had a brilliant idea of transferring the files to an external hard drive (the folder .virtual machine which contains the hard disks vdi file). I then deleted the one on the host OS (win7) but it didn't work, oh well so i tried copying and pasting the folder.virtual machine back to its original place, however I get the error:

'could not open the medium 'C:\users\user\.virtualbox\hard disks\xpvdi'

VD: error VERR PATH NOT FOUND opening image file 'C\Users\user\.virtualbox\harddisks\xp.vdi'
(VERR_PATH NOT FOUND)

I would simply reinstall VB but there is data on the disk that i need.

Thanks for help in advance

[Sasquatch]

Did the VDI file transfer properly to the external drive? If so, then you can simply tell VB to use the VDI in that location from now on. They don't have to be in the default location.

[y2k1]

Hi tyvm for the reply. I thinki've fixed it. What I did was I deleted all the files with VB except the HD file and reinstalled and selected the pre existing disk. It's a long way round tho. Thanks again realy fast reply!

[mpack]

I'm curious as to why you ran out of space on the host drive. With a 70GB host drive and assuming typical consumption, you probably had about half that free for use right? A typical dynamic VDI would have been just a few GB when created - unless you were crazy enough to choose fixed instead of dynamic, for no known good reason (plenty of myth around tho...).

Keeping the VDI on an external drive is not a good long term solution IMHO. First of all performance will be much worse, second there is the danger of absent mindedly unplugging the external drive before you have shut down the VM, i.e. likely to cause drive corruption.