How to import Hard Disks into Virtual Media Manager?

[seandarcy]

My fedora server died. But I had all XP and W7 vb machines on attached raid storage. Parent folder VirtualBox, subfolders: HardDrives, Machines, Shared.

I got a new server, installed 4.0.2. Go to Machine -> Add. Pick a machine in the Machines folder. But that doesn't work, I get a uuid error because it can't find the associated hard drive. And there doesn't seem to be any way to tell it which folder it's in. I did look in the Machine xml file, but didn't see anything there, just the uuid. The Virtual Media Manager seems to have no way way to add drives.

Then I created a new machine, using the existing hard drive. That worked. Then went back to Machine-> Add, used an old machine with THAT hard drive, and that worked! Now I removed the new machine, and the Hard Drive disappears from Media Manager, and the old machine no longer works.

So it appears if you remove the first machine that attached a hard drive, the hard drive is no longer available to machines that were subsequently attached.

Now have one virtual machine - "HardDrives" - that has attached all the old hard drives. And all the old machines work.

Shouldn't VMM be able to manage this?

sean

[mpack]

VBox v4 no longer has a global media registry (at least not one that gets saved); this is one of the penalties for moving to a more portable VM (folder based) configuration. Each VM now has its own registry stored in its own XML file - and it's these (v4 compatible) xml files that Machine|Add expects. If you try to add a v3 or earlier xml file then of course it will be missing its hard disk register.

Basically, you need a thorough knowledge of where VBox keeps things if you want to manipulate xml and image files directly. Perhaps import/export would suit you better.

[seandarcy]

Well exporting and then importing wouldn't work unless you knew when the server would fail.

Can you import if you haven't exported? How would that work?

Is there a way to convert a 3.x <Machine.xml> file to a 4.0 <Machine.vbox> file?

sean

[Perryg]

Read the second section down. Is this what you are looking for http://blogs.sun.com/fatbloke/ ?

[seandarcy]

Very interesting. Thanks for the link.

I've now exported and imported a W7 vm. Sadly W7 now thinks it's a counterfeit machine! So I'll need to keep the fake harddisks machine, and run the original W7's. All 12 of them.

sean