virtualbox.org

I've got VirtualBox version 4.1.14 running on a Lion host (v 10.7.3). I've got a WinXP guest that I've been running for a while.

Last week I selected the "shut down" option from the guest's window's "start" menu and walked away. In the meantime, there was a power outage, and my host rebooted.

Now when I go into the VirtualBox Manager application to start up my guest, it says the vm is "powered off", but the "Start" option in the VB Manager is disabled for that virtual machine (but is available for others) - so i cannot start it.

When I try to start the virtual machine with the vboxmanage command line, I get the following message:
I've tried restarting virtual box, and even rebooting the host, but nothing seems to work.

Any suggestions on what I could do to fix this to be able to start my guest up again?

While in the VirtualBox main manager and the guest is selected, does the Discard icon seem to be available? If so try that.
Otherwise you could look in the guests folder and see if there is a *.xml-prev file. Make a backup of the *.xml and then rename the *.xml-prev to *.xml.

Discard icon is also disabled.

There is no *.xml-prev or any xml file in the gust directory, but I did find *.vbox and *.vbox-prev files. I made backups and renamed the vbox-prev to the vbox file. It did not make a difference. The "Start" and "Discard" buttons in VB Manager are still disabled, and I get the same error from the command line.

Well there is only one other thing that I can think of. Look in you systems tmp folder and see if you have a folder that looks like .vbox-*-ipc
Does it exist and is there a file inside that says lock?

Everything VirtualBox must be shut down and you should wait at least 20 seconds then try renaming the folder, then try to start the guest.

If that doesn't work and you don't have a backup I really don't know what else to tell you.

That worked. Thanks!