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I have an XP guest with an internal disk and 2 external disks. I had to do a hard shutdown on the guest bc a program was not responding. When I tried to boot the guest again, I got an error stating 'Failed to open virtual machine located in <path>. Could not find an open hard disk with UUID <299....##>

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

Attached is the xml file and the vbox file. Any help in getting this sorted is hugely appreciated.

Your best chance to recover this is to restore from backup just like on a real PC.
If you do not have a backup and IF you DO NOT have snapshots you can delete the guest (being careful to not delete the files) and create it again then attach the original *.VDI when asked if you want to create a new HDD or use an existing one. If you have snapshots you probably can still recover the original install but the snapshots will be gone

sbkurtz wrote:I had to do a hard shutdown on the guest bc a program was not responding.

What do you mean by "a hard shutdown on the guest"?

A "power down" of the guest is done under full control of VBox and while it may result in minor corruption inside the guest (same as cutting power to your host PC), it should not have caused corruption on the host, i.e. your xml files.

I notice that you have no hard disks in your media registry at all - at least nothing in VirtualBox.xml or in the VM local registry. That leaves drives registered in other VMs: were you attempting to share hard disks across VMs?

hard shutdown = ACPI...Disaster Recovery worked!! thanks for the input