virtualbox.org

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

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.

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

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

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