virtualbox.org

I have (or rather, had) two hard drives in my system, an SSD and a traditional spinning disk. I stored the main virtualbox vm drive files on the spinning disk, but it recently crashed and I was unable to recovery one of the VM files I needed.

However, I took snapshots of the VM I need to recover, and these were stored on the SSD by default. They're still there as a matter of fact.

My question is, is there any way at all I can recovery the files in that VM from the .vdi snapshot file? Or should I just abandon all hope?

Negative. All the snapshots will have is the data you changed since you took the snapshots. The original data from the base disk is not in the snapshots. Bad news boiled down: if you don't have a backup of that platter drive dating from the day you took the first snapshot, that guest has gone South.

Ahh, drat...

I know I'm grasping at straws, but the snapshot I took was of a bare bones Linux install with everything configured for a server environment. So all the work I did in the VM was done after the snapshot was made.

Does that change anything given what you said about the vdi file containing the work done after the snapshot was taken?

Well the data might be there, but better heads than mine will have to say if anything can be done to get it out. I don't know if the snapshot disk contains anything along the lines of a readable filesystem that could be used to attach that drive to another guest and try to read from it. Whatever you do, do it with a copy of the file, just in case something that would work comes along.

No. Even if you could exactly reproduce the steps that led to the data on the old base VDI (which I'd call a near impossible task all by itself), the UUIDs still wouldn't match, so no tool would accept the chain of files as valid.

A snapshot chain is like a patch list. If you don't have the thing that's being patched then you have nothing. And no, there is no filesystem in a snapshot. It's just changed sector numbers and data. Snapshots work at the disk sector level, not the guest OS filesystem level.