virtualbox.org

IFChicago wrote:It appears search doesnt work very well on macs.

Spotlight doesn't search in folders where Apple doesn't expect users to be storing files. One of those excluded folders is the users Library folder, where VirtualBox defaults to installing the VMs and their associated settings files.

Well, this would appear to be the problem :-

[quote="JKMacBookWin7.vbox"]
      <StorageController name="IDE Controller" type="PIIX4" PortCount="2" useHostIOCache="true" Bootable="true">
           <AttachedDevice passthrough="false" type="DVD" port="0" device="0">
                <Image uuid="{b686ed09-ccd1-45ae-9d8d-ab9ff460aa75}"/>
           </AttachedDevice>
           <AttachedDevice passthrough="false" tempeject="true" type="DVD" port="1" device="0">
                <Image uuid="{b686ed09-ccd1-45ae-9d8d-ab9ff460aa75}"/>
           </AttachedDevice>
      </StorageController>
[/quote]

You have the same disk mounted in two different DVD drives - an impossible situation in real life. Is this not shown twice in the VM settings?

Regardless, I have manually corrected the .vbox file for you. Unpack the file from the attached zip and use it to overwrite the one that you gave me. There's no need for you to make a backup since your backup is in the zip you posted earlier.

I think what happened is that at some point you wanted to attach an ISO image which was in fact already attached, but you added a new DVD drive instead, then mounted the ISO in it. Watch out for that - the number of drives listed in the left side of the Storage panel should not change when you mount an ISO into one of them.

Do you think there is any chance of recovering the file?

What happened when you tried what I provided above?

thank you! this helped me realize that I had the ad-hoc ISO enabled for two of my VMs (neither of which would power-on)

I typically use a different hypervisor, so this was new to me, but you guys def helped me out. THANKS!!

Having an ISO installed in two VMs is not a problem.

The OPs problem was an virtual CD mounted in two separate CD drives of the same VM.

p.s. not that it makes a great difference to your point, but just for completeness: the "ad hoc ISO" feature was introduced in VirtualBox v6, it didn't exist in 2013.