virtualbox.org

HI All,

i was installing netbeans into my opensolaris guest,
(name: opensolaris) when the system ran out of space.

vbox says that the guest is no longer accessible,
and the opensolaris.xml file is now empty.

i followed suggestions on the forum to create a
new guest using the disk image of the old guest.

however, that gives me a new guest at the earliest
snapshot of the old guest.

is there a way i can get the snapshots from the old
guest into the new one ?

or is there a command that can be ran against the
snaphots to re-create the xml file ?

Thanks,
sam

To directly answer your question: assuming you have freed up enough disk space, then running VBoxManage clonehd on the most recent snapshot should result in a merged clone which you can build a new VM around.

However, there may be a simpler solution. Was there no <vmname>.xml-prev file in the VM folder? If yes then its possible that renaming that to <vmname>.xml will recover the VM - or at least recover more of it than does accessing the base VDI in a broken snapshot chain! (the advice you picked up from other threads was terrible btw).

Thanks mpack!
will try as suggested.
cheers,Sam

hi mpack,

clonehd works like you suggested.

although the latest snapshot (from ls -lt output), didn't seem
to get back to the state i wanted, had to back down a few snapshots
(to one that had a corresponding .sav file).

thanks very much again!
sam

ssgam wrote:although the latest snapshot (from ls -lt output), didn't seem to get back to the state i wanted, had to back down a few snapshots
(to one that had a corresponding .sav file).

The last modified date ought to be a pretty good indicator of which snapshot was most recently in use. Still, I'm glad you seem to have got your data back at least.

mpack wrote: However, there may be a simpler solution. Was there no <vmname>.xml-prev file in the VM folder? If yes then its possible that renaming that to <vmname>.xml will recover the VM - or at least recover more of it than does accessing the base VDI in a broken snapshot chain! (the advice you picked up from other threads was terrible btw).

I know its an old thread but you've saved me (wo)man! Its worth registering with all the personal information that Oracle wants from me, to just say thanks because you deserve it.

I've had the exact same problem as the OP. I've tried the simpler solution as I didn't have enough space for clonehd and it worked.

Well thanks to you to for going to all that trouble to provide feedback.

I should mention however that the advice above was correct two years ago, but things have moved on somewhat. New VMs created with VirtualBox v4.0.0 or later no longer have .xml files, instead they have .vbox files (which internally are still xml). In principle the solution still applies, except that it's ".vbox-prev" you should be looking for and renaming to ".vbox".

The ".vbox" name was introduced so that host OS's could identify VirtualBox control files distinctly from other xml files.


btw: snapshots are unreliable at the best of times and take up a lot of disk space. I think it's unwise to use them if disk space is short (you mentioned you didn't have enough space for clonehd). Hopefully you make regular backups to an external drive, and understand that snapshots themselves are useless as backups.

You are the 2Pac of the Virtualbox world. Thanks! Cheers

mpack wrote:To directly answer your question: assuming you have freed up enough disk space, then running VBoxManage clonehd on the most recent snapshot should result in a merged clone which you can build a new VM around.

However, there may be a simpler solution. Was there no <vmname>.xml-prev file in the VM folder? If yes then its possible that renaming that to <vmname>.xml will recover the VM - or at least recover more of it than does accessing the base VDI in a broken snapshot chain! (the advice you picked up from other threads was terrible btw).