vhd not recogniced after severla crashes

[f456]

Hello,

I am running a win7 x64 sp1 host with all updates installed and the lates version of vitualbox (4.1.20). I upgraded vbox last week, iirc, and up to know everything has been working fine.
Today, however, out of the blue i suffered several crashes, some in vbox main.exe, one in virtualimagemanager and some in various qt dlls.

After this, everything is broken. To start with, i am running 2 xp vms, and 2 *buntu vms. The crashes occurred when trying to start xpvm1. Now i keep getting a

Failed to open a session for the virtual machine xpvm1.

No error info.

Result Code: E_FAIL (0x80004005)
Component: ProgressProxy
Interface: IProgress {guid}

when trying to launch it.

I get this not only for the vm that had the problems, but for both of the windows vms. The unbuntu ones still work fine.
So far i have no clue what`s going on, but i really couldnt care less: on xpvm1 there`s about 5 month of unsaved work, which i need to retrieve.
That data is all i care for, the vms can go to hell.

Now, this wouldnt be a problem at all, as i`d just load xpvm1.vhd and copy the data off of it. But no, vbox feels differently about this.
Somehow (and i most certainly did not configure it that way) vbox created a SECOND .vhd file, a "differencing vhd" in the Snapshot subdirectory!
Loading the main .vhd file works fine, but the data it holds is hopelessly outdated. The differencing vhd is not a valid vhd at all.

Now the question: how can i merge these two or load them together properly so i can get hold of my data?


In desperate need for help.

[f456]

ok, got my data.

follow up:
ofcurse i know how to setup a differencing vhd, the problem is just that it wouldn't work in this specific case.
I would get as far as the boot or login screen of the xpvm, but then vbox would crash again, access violation, i think, but it can only display the error message for a second
before the whole service comes down crashing.
For some unknown reason i would live long enough for me to grab my data and run, after several desperate attempts.I dont even know why i got the data of the differencing vm, in previous attempts this had not worked and i only had the outdated version.

Anyways, i am glad this nightmare is over and i have my data. But i am dropping vbox, free & os or not, we`re falling back to vmware. No problems with that in years, while vbox has barely been running as an experiment for about 5 weeks.
Not worth the money we`d be saving.


great day to you all,

[mikeinnyc]

Result Code: E_FAIL (0x80004005)

I just had the same problem. It was the VM had no hard drive space left AFTER Paging file space used.

once I deleted some space rebooted everything works fine. Better than new

When you have it hooked up she flys better than VMware IMO.

Also save one master copy so you can rebuild any VM from scratch. just delete the entire VM AFTER you backup and ONLY leave the one large file behind. Delete everything else and redo a new Vm.

Working 123 instead of left behind files with BSOD and errors.

hope that helps. Stay with it.