virtualbox.org

I'm using 4.12 on my Mackbook Pro dual booting Ubuntu Oneric && OSX 10.7 (running vbox on both os's). I had a couple guest vms (XP & ubuntu) on this same MBP before and the system failed but I had a backup on external drive so when I re-installed the OS'es I copied the vdi and vbox back to the same path they were before and drag/drop the .vdi files into virtual media manager and drag/drop the .vbox into the vm list menu. THe vm guests will then run fine however every time I close vbox the next time I open it the VM guest shows 'inaccessible' and I open up virtual media manager to see the .vdi files no longer listed. I have to re-drag/drop and then refresh guest vm it works again. Rinse and repeat.

Any ideas what this is about? I've tried this on both Ubuntu as well as OSX they both behave the same.

VirtualBox v4 no longer has a global media registry, instead each VM has its own local media registry. The media registry you see in File|Virtual Media Manager is dynamically created in memory from all currently accessible VMs.

So, if a VM's control file is inaccessible after VBox restarts - e.g. because the .vbox file is on an inaccessible drive - then it's media entries will be unavailable too.

In other words the missing media is a symptom.

mpack, thanks first of all for helping me out. I'm a little confused because I had copied those vdi and vbox files off the removal backup drive and is now permanently on the local internal disk. In ubuntu i've placed it under the '/home/me/VirtualBox\ VMs' dir and in OSX it's in my '/Users/me/VirtualBox\ VMs' dir. At no point are they inaccessible.

I'm not a Mac (of any description) user, so I'm afraid you'll have to wait until another Macbook can give definitive advice. Personally I'm thinking that perhaps the drive takes a while to spin up to speed.