virtualbox.org

Running Windows Ultimate 7 x64
VirtualBox 4.1.18

Have a vdi file that Ive been using for quite some time and just the other day it started freezing at the Windows starting screen. Played around with it a bit, regen UUID, disk defrag, some other low level diagnostics and only made the issue worse. Now when I start up the VM I get a "error reading from disk" before it even gets to windows.

Following some of the other posts I tried cloning the VDI file with VBoxManager and I get the following error message:
Then using CLoneVDI I get this error message: I ran the Roadkils Boot Build but honestly im not real confident on what I should do, in terms of rebuilding the boot sector. Heres what it is currently set to:
So my question is two fold:

1. Should I rebuild the boot sector and what values should I use?
2. Is there something else I should be looking at to resolve?

Thanks in advance.

Rebuild the boot sector? No, why would you want to that?

It's a host disk error, so run "chkdsk /f d:" where 'd' should be replaced by the affected drive letter. If the corrupted drive means that you have lost your VDI file, then you must restore it from a backup, after chkdsk has fixed the underlying problems.

However.... I noticed that your first post seems to describe two different errors - VBoxManage is unable to create (write) a new file, CloneVDI is unable to read from an existing one. Also the drive letter 'Z' usually designates a network drive. Is this actually a disconnected network drive? If so then that would explain why you can't read or write to it - and chkdsk and boot sector rebuild operations would be utterly pointless too.

no this is not a network drink, it is a USB drive. I just assigned it Z cause I was having issues with it constantly changing drive letters. I ran Disk Defrag and also SmartDefrag from iObit which I think runs chkdsk but will run again and report back.

restore from a backup....thats funny.

thanks for the quick reply!

ok, ran chkdsk, started VM and it just sits with a blank black screen with the cursor in the upper let hand corner.

I checked another VM that I hadnt run in a while and its doing the same thing. Im going to try moving the VDI to another HDD (no space on my system disk) and see if thats the issue.

Any other suggestions?

UPDATE:
Apparently it took about 15 min to register it but the VM threw the "a disk read error occurred"

Sorry, my list of suggestions has not changed from what I already gave above, and I'm pretty sure no-one else can add anything important. If the drive is unreadable and unfixable then you need a backup copy of the VM.

seems strange that I can explore the drive, copy files off the drive but not recover the VM files.

ThePriceIsWrong wrote:seems strange that I can explore the drive, copy files off the drive but not recover the VM files.

It isn't strange at all that you can explore the drive: it means that the relatively small area of the drive containing the directory is not affected by the corruption. Of course when it comes to reading files, the larger any given file is, the greater is the chance that it would be affected by any corruption.

Of course the drive may not be corrupted at a hardware level: it may simply have been catastrophic operator error, e.g. pulling the drive while it was still being written to, and/or pulling a drive which is not optimised for quick removal - these result in a corrupted filesystem. I'm afraid that without adequate diagnostics it isn't possible for me to tell from here what your problem is, though one clue perhaps is that chkdsk refuses to fix the drive.

How did you get large files to live on a portable drive? Did you reformat it in NTFS format? I'm assuming your VDIs are larger than 4GB?

actually its highly possible that this is operator error generated corruption. I put the host system to sleep before pausing the VMs the day before this all happened. However, I just tried to create a new VM and mount the Windows install ISO and VirtualBox completely crashed.

Im trying to copy everything off there that I can and then Ill just reformat the drive to see if its still usable.

The drive is a 1TB WD Passport, its USB but its not SSD (obviously). And yes, its formatted NTFS. And yes, the VDIs are 25GB.