How to remove a ghost DVD iso

[frederik_t]

I am trying to open a virtual machine which was saved on disk (i.e. it is not currently in my virtualbox folder or shown in the virtual box manager.
I get the following error message

Code: Select all

Failed to open virtual machine located in /data/userdata/data/FU-D013/my_machine/fu/fu.vbox. Cannot register the DVD image '/data/home/mbianchi/VirtualBox VMs/fu-distribution/data.iso' {e058045f-a0ca-476f-8d92-e01452e5f7c6} because a CD/DVD image '/data/virtualbox/fu my machine/data.iso' with UUID {e058045f-a0ca-476f-8d92-e01452e5f7c6} already exists.

Details:
Result Code: 
NS_ERROR_INVALID_ARG (0x80070057)
Component: 
VirtualBox
Interface: 
IVirtualBox {3b2f08eb-b810-4715-bee0-bb06b9880ad2}

data.iso shows up in the Virtual Media Manager under optical disks as 'Not attached' (and with a yellow triangle as the disk file no longer exists). If I click 'Remove' I get error

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Failed to close the CD/DVD image /data/virtualbox/fu my machine/data.iso.

Medium '/data/virtualbox/fu my machine/data.iso' cannot be closed because it is still attached to 1 virtual machines.

Details:
Result Code: VBOX_E_OBJECT_IN_USE (0x80BB000C)
Component: Medium
Interface: IMedium {29989373-b111-4654-8493-2e1176cba890}

About the history: I had an instance of "fu my machine" previously running which had mounted data.iso. As I had previous issues with similar conflicts, I have first unmounted data.iso in the guest and then deleted this machine with removal of all disk files option selected.

data.iso is and was not attached to any other machine currently under virtualbox control. In spite of googling around I am totally at a loss how I can get rid of this ghost DVD iso. None of the other posters had the issue that neither machine nor physical file exist anymore for the conflicting iso image.
Ideally I would have a way to delete the link to that iso in the Virtual Media Manager, so that I can reopen the virtual machine file which wants to access it.
Short of this information, it would be helpful to know where virtualbox gets the information from that is used to populate the Virtual Media Manager, as I maybe can try to edit this out by hand (or would this cause further instability?)

Another work-around might be to edit the .vbox file which I would like to open to remove the reference to that .iso, and then remount it. I cannot remember if the DVD was mounted in the guest, but I fear it was.

Version info: 4.2.4 Host: Linux Mint 13 (based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS) Guest: Was an older Ubuntu (11.04) but should not be relevant as it has been deleted

[noteirak]

The info is located directly into the .vbox file, yes. If you are confortable editing it yourself and the reference is there, remove the entry about that ISO and close any tag that you need to.
If not, attach your .vbox to this topic and I'll edit it for you.

[ChipMcK]

Release and then Remove ?????

[frederik_t]

ChipMcK Release is greyed out, so in theory there should be nothing blocking the removal.

noteirak: Thank you for this offer. I think I will try and have a go myself (the .vbox file is on my work computer so I will have to wait for the next day) but if that fails I might yet come back to your offer.