virtualbox.org

Host OS: Windows 8
Virtualbox Build: Latest
VDI Storage: Windows 8 boot partition (SSD's)

Not sure what other information you may need. I have installed Guest VM's on my host OS and they are saved and can be shut down and rebooted just fine. When I reboot my host OS and launch VBOX it says that the VDI images are in-accessable. The VDI images are still on host disk, but my media manager within VBOX is empty.

If go to the command prompt and do vboxmanage modifyhd and put in the path to each image (and actually not change any of the VDI options) the VDI is added back to the VBOX media manager. Then I can refresh the VM (in the VBOX menu) and then I can launch the VM with no issues at all. When I reboot the host OS again the same thing happens. I have tried moving the contents of the .Virtuabox folder under my Users directory, then adding my disks and VM's and then rebooting and that has not helped either.

** I have 3 identical systems and all three have this exact issue. When I run vssadmin on all three to list writers and providers I don't see any issues. One machine is on the latest release of VBOX, and the other two are on latest - 1 release. **

I can work around it by making a batch file and issue all of the commands after I do a cold OS boot, but it still seems very odd behavior. I've ran windows 8 as a host OS before and not had this specific issue.

It appears that I only have to close virtualbox and restart it to have this issue happen. I don't even need to warm or cold boot the OS.

Wild guess : permission issues? or UAT issues?

Good starting point, I'm an admin user on the box so I'll check that when I get back home. UAC is turned off so no issues there. Thanks for the suggestions.

Permissions are fine. Any other ideas?

This is also happening on my Windows Server 2012 box (Hyper-V off obviously).

There's no magic involved here. When you create a VM or add media to a VM then the media is added to a table within the .vbox file which contains the VM settings. The .vbox file is in the VM folder. You can easily check that got updated correctly (view in a decent text editor). If the media goes AWOL then you can check the .vbox file again. I can't offhand think of a VBox mechanism which can remove lines from that file, but I know of several ways for users to screw it up (e.g. dragging and dropping media onto the GUI, or some sort of backup/restore regime gone crazy).