Differencing image of snapshot could not be found

[sbkurtz]

Ive been a happy user for several months. Im running vbox 4.0.10 on Win7 with an XP guest. Within the guest, I added 2 additional drives so now I have C, D, and E. The problem is nearly every single time I reboot the guest, or at least vbox, I get an error that states: failed to open virtual machine located in <c:path>. Could not find an open hard disk with UUID <string>. I suspect there is a problem loading one of these drives.

To recover from this, I generally remove and re-add the virtual box machine definition file, only about 13kb. Unfortunately, over the last 2 days I cannot load this definition file, which means I cant load my vm. Ive tried uninstalling and reinstalling vbox but to no avail.

help?

[mpack]

Exact VBox version?

Exact error message when you try to add the .vbox file?

I'm not sure why unregistering/re-registering the .vbox file would have helped, unless you were adding back an uncorrupted copy.

[sbkurtz]

vbox 4.0.10 r72479

error message is " failed to open virtual machines located in <path>. Could not find an open hard disk with UUID <tag>


Result Code:
VBOX_E_OBJECT_NOT_FOUND (0x80BB0001)
Component:
VirtualBox
Interface:
IVirtualBox {d2de270c-1d4b-4c9e-843f-bbb9b47269ff}

[mpack]

No, that is the same error message you already gave me.

The 2nd paragraph of your first message says :-

over the last 2 days I cannot load this definition file, which means I cant load my vm

I want to know what error message you are getting which is preventing you from "loading this definition file". I want to know the current state of play in adequate detail.

[sbkurtz]

Thanks for your help on this. The error message I listed is exactly what I gave you when trying to load the vm. The process is that I try to open vbox mgr, and add the definition which is when I get the error. I cannot even start up the vm

[mpack]

Please post your .vbox file here, as an attachment. Also post your VirtualBox.xml file, again as an attachment.

[sbkurtz]

Thanks for your help. When I tried to upload the definition file, it said it wouldnt upload vbox extension so I zipped it. One thing that I noticed when reading thru the xml file was that it seemed to be trying to reference an linux guest that I dont have any longer. I tried to delete the reference within the xml and save the file but it wouldnt fix the problem. any help is appreciated, thx

[mpack]

Well, you do seem to have problems - you have no hard disks in your media registry at all, or at least not in the parts of the registry I can see. The legacy (v3) media registry in VirtualBox.xml is empty of hard disks, as is the hard disks section in the local media registry in XP_Copy.vbox.

The IDE controller section is attempting to mount two hard disks, the boot drive is supposed to have a UUID beginning "299912ba-...", a secondary hd has UUID "f3605250-...". You also have a SATA controller added, and it mounts a third hard disk!

Now v4 has a distributed media registry, and allows drives to be shared, so best guess is that you cross referenced the media registry belonging to another VM, and then deleted that other VM?

I have no idea what you are trying to achieve - you mentioned nothing about wanting multiple hard disks to be attached.

Anyway, please find a modified XP-Copy.vbox inside the attached zip. Make sure VirtualBox is not running, then overwrite your old .vbox file with this one. The only changes I've made are to detach all hard disk media, and delete the SATA controller. This VM now has NO hard disks attached to it. You need to run the VBox GUI, go into the Storage settings for this VM, add a new hard disk drive. Select "Use existing..." and browse to your XP vdi, which must not be already in use in another VM. If necessary you should make a clone of the VDI to satisfy this requirement (see CloneVDI).

[sbkurtz]

Huge thanks for your help on this. Im back on track. Just so you know, I actually added the drives some time ago when I first installed vbox and ran out of space. I was messing around with adding drives until it worked and then just left it for fear of breaking something. I didnt really have the time or energy and figured that I would need the extra space at some point anyway, so I left it. The only thing that I can think of that really messed things up was adding a linux vm and then deleting it. Vbox seemed to get really confused at that point, though Im not sure why. Things worked well up until then. Ill keep this for reference but perhaps Ill try to migrate the date from the sata drive and then simply delete it. Anyways, thanks for your help

[mpack]

perhaps Ill try to migrate the data from the sata drive and then simply delete it

I'm not sure if this is what you mean, but there is nothing about a drive image itself that makes it "a sata drive", i.e. it's quite ok to attach the drive image to an IDE controller instead, even if its your boot drive.

[sbkurtz]

yeah, I realized that AFTER I created it. Like I mentioned, once I got it working, I really didnt want to jinx myself. Thanks for all your help