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I have portable Virtual Box on my USB stick. The stick is very slow (Class 2). However, I just found out when i save the machine state (which takes about 4-5 min), I can resume in just 20 secs. My virtual drive is immutable (write protected).

Is there a way, to keep this Machine state, beeing able to resume to this state as often as I want, and not having to save a new state when I swhitch off? At best, I'd like to just power off the virtual machine, because with my drive beeing immutable, it wouldn't matter anyway.

Guest is Windows XP, host is Win 7. I tried to Hibernate the Guest from within, switch the disk to immutable, but resume won't work that way (guest hangs after progress bar reaches 100%). Furthermore, its very slow. (Takes about 1min until the progress bar "resume from hibernation" is at 100%)

Portable VirtualBox is not supported on this site. You need to go to their site.

Switched from Portable to normal install, no difference. I can't see an option to keep the last state and hibernated VM keeps crashing after loading the Memory image.

Bonedaddy wrote:Switched from Portable to normal install, no difference. I can't see an option to keep the last state and hibernated VM keeps crashing after loading the Memory image.

Take a snapshot right after the VM has booted up, then close the window, choose "Power off the machine" and restore that snapshot before starting the machine the next time?

Leak, i tried that. I made the last snapshop write protected. Unfortunately, Virtual Box shows me the coresponding machine as switched off, when I switch it off. I had to trick Vbox to use that last saved state, but I have no idea how to do so.

Bonedaddy wrote:Leak, i tried that. I made the last snapshop write protected. Unfortunately, Virtual Box shows me the coresponding machine as switched off, when I switch it off. I had to trick Vbox to use that last saved state, but I have no idea how to do so.

In that case you're doing it wrong.

Make a regular old snapshot when the machine is running, close the VM window and choose "Power off the machine" (which is a cold power off without any saving of state) and check the "Restore current snapshot 'foo'" box below it (which makes sure this snapshot gets loaded on the next VM start instead of a cold boot).

If you turn the machine off via the guest OS you'll have to restore the snapshot in the VirtualBox manager by hand before starting the VM.