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Hello,

I'm having problems with a CentOS vm that I've imported from an ova file. Each time I shutdown the VM, any changes made are trashed (as if the disk were immutable). However, the disk has type "normal":

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jcuzella@cirrus:centos-64-5.5$ VBoxManage showhdinfo centos-64-5.5-disk1.vmdk 
UUID:                 d962fa1c-a5b4-4251-8a99-8dad6052bc16
Accessible:           yes
Logical size:         25600 MBytes
Current size on disk: 2358 MBytes
Type:                 normal (base)
Storage format:       VMDK
Format variant:       dynamic default
In use by VMs:        centos-64-5.5 (UUID: b1d2dbf7-65a8-4c1a-941b-995d398a61da)
Location:             /home/jcuzella/.VirtualBox/VMs/centos-64-5.5/centos-64-5.5-disk1.vmdk

Here are the steps that I can do to reproduce the problem:

Import the OVA file
Create a snapshot called "Clean"
Boot the VM
Create a file
Do a "shutdown -h now" on the VM
Create another snapshot
Boot the VM
The file created previously does not exist!

I see some stuff in the VM log mentioning something about "pdmacFileEpInitialize failed" for the vmdk images...

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00:00:01.422 pdmacFileEpInitialize: RTFileOpen /home/jcuzella/.VirtualBox/VMs/centos-64-5.5/centos-64-5.5-disk1.vmdk / 000c0781 failed with VERR_INVALID_PARAMETER
00:00:01.422 AIOMgr: Endpoint for file '/home/jcuzella/.VirtualBox/VMs/centos-64-5.5/centos-64-5.5-disk1.vmdk' (flags 00000781) created successfully
00:00:01.435 pdmacFileEpInitialize: RTFileOpen /home/jcuzella/.VirtualBox/VMs/centos-64-5.5/Snapshots/{9cded8c4-aae8-4989-b2ee-51a78bae4c1d}.vmdk / 000c0781 failed with VERR_INVALID_PARAMETER
00:00:01.436 AIOMgr: Endpoint for file '/home/jcuzella/.VirtualBox/VMs/centos-64-5.5/Snapshots/{9cded8c4-aae8-4989-b2ee-51a78bae4c1d}.vmdk' (flags 00000781) created successfully
00:00:01.450 pdmacFileEpInitialize: RTFileOpen /home/jcuzella/.VirtualBox/VMs/centos-64-5.5/Snapshots/{5de1505e-805b-42ed-b4bd-41bf7d8610bb}.vmdk / 000c0723 failed with VERR_INVALID_PARAMETER
00:00:01.450 AIOMgr: Endpoint for file '/home/jcuzella/.VirtualBox/VMs/centos-64-5.5/Snapshots/{5de1505e-805b-42ed-b4bd-41bf7d8610bb}.vmdk' (flags 00000723) created successfully

So for anyone having troubles like this... Here's what I ended up figuring out:

For whatever reason, it turns out that the "Use host I/O cache" checkbox on my VM's hard disk controller was not checked. Not only were new files I created on the VM not showing up, but upon a restart I saw tons of filesystem errors, erratic behavior, and even some segfaults in VBoxSVC!

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24543.005689]VirtualBox[777]: segfault at 18 ip 00007f617270a547 sp 00007f6170e39c70 error 4 in VBoxDDU.so[7f61726f8000+41000]
[25662.726321] Skipping EDID probe due to cached edid
[26167.420303] Skipping EDID probe due to cached edid
[30214.249741] VBoxSVC[7237]: segfault at 0 ip 00000000004fcac7 sp 00007fdd8a071b30 error 4 in VBoxSVC[400000+21f000]

To fix it, I just enabled the checkbox, and all problems went away

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VM acting like disk is immutable after making a snapshot

VM acting like disk is immutable after making a snapshot

Re: VM acting like disk is immutable after making a snapshot