VM does not start up- Ubuntu 12.04.3 (ROS Groovy) on Mac OSX

[N.Renee]

My VM will not start up properly. It goes through the boot up process and stalls before the profile is displayed (shown in the screen shot below).

Screen Shot 2014-04-20 at 9.55.58 PM.png (29.55 KiB) Viewed 1025 times

I am operating Ubuntu 12.04.3 (Groovy) Virtual Machine using VirtualBox 4.3.6 on a Mac OS X 10.7.5
Prior to restarting the VM, I did the following:
1) While trying to import .bag files from my Mac (using the drag/drop method) I was notified that there was not enough space to download the files. The files were not visible in the folder I imported them into but appeared when I searched for them on the entire profile.
2) I attempted to install the updates for the VM and was notified that there was not enough free disk space. The prompt recommended that I free space by emptying a directory, I cannot recall if it was a temporary directory, but I copied the prompt and pasted it into the terminal window. I don't know what I deleted.
3) After doing that, I opened a new terminal window. The following error was shown:
"close failed in file object destructor:
sys.excepthook is missing
lost sys.stderr
bash: [: 0: unary operator expected"

When I tried to run roscore, it returned "command not found"

I then shut down the VM and attempted to start it back up, resulting in the issue I am currently having.
If I cannot restore the VM, I need to extract some python files. Please advise.
Thanks,
Nicole

[noteirak]

So far it seems you corrupted your OS inside the VM, which is not linked to Virtualbox.

Some warnings tho :
- you allocated almost all your free RAM to the VM (2GB with only 2.3 GB free). This will lead to issues later on
- Your main disk is a VMDK. Seems like you downloaded the VM from somewhere.
- You got errors about non enough free space - you should do something about that, and not delete files at random.

[N.Renee]

Thanks, everything you stated is true. The insight on the allocated hard drive space is especially useful and I will take that under advisement when I install a new VM.
My working solution was to run my alternate VM in VirtualBox and add the corrupted VM as a second hard drive. Once I manually remapped it to the functioning VM, I was able to access all my files.