virtualbox.org

I used to have a virtualbox guest on a windows host, and it worked very nicely. But it was a long time ago and I'm not sure what I did wrong. I returned to this host to find the guests were moved to various other directories. I remember vaguely doing these movements due to lack of space on the hard drives.

In the default vm directory where all the vdi and the snapshots are, lie the two folders that are giving me the trouble. One is the guest, and the other is the clone of that guest, or at least it would seem so.

Inside the clone folder, there is no vdi file. But inside its subfolder there is a snapshot, pretty large one too.

Inside the original folder, there is nothing too, but at least I found what seemed like a copy of it elsewhere on the pc, so I copied it back there. That was when the virtualbox manager refreshed correctly. So I tried to start the orginal guest, and it asked me to change the network connection settings, but then it gave me error 0x80004005 and refused to move forward. Inside the original folder, there is a subfolder with what seems like a very small snapshot.

Virtualbox manager must have been referring to the clone folder in the other entry, because before I moved the original vdi to the original folder, it was asking for a vdi with the uuid that is the exact same of what I found in the title of the snapshot inside the subfolder of the clone folder. But only once I moved the original vdi back to its folder did the virtualbox manager allow me to fire up the clone virtual machine, albeit to the same exact error I get when trying to fire up the original vm. OMG, I know! scandalously confusing!

Help please, I'm clueless right now.

Why does the clone folder have a snapshot so huge, why was it referring to the a different uuid and what is this error? Should I try to solve the 0x80004005 error or a new vbox with the snapshot (When I try to the latter it tells me it needs the parent ID)?

The clone folder was undoubtedly a linked clone, not a fully independant VM. When you create a linked clone the VDI of the original VM is frozen, and both the original VM and the linked clone will therefore write to difference images (the file in the snapshot folder). If there's a lot of writes then of course the difference file can be quite large.

You seem to be missing the frozen original VDI.

If the clone VM was still running then you could have full-cloned it, to make an indendant VM.

Snapshots and linked clones are really terrible ideas. Unfortunately, the people this feature appeals to are precisely those people who can't really understand why that's the case.