Repeated loss of virtual machines/virtual disks

[RossB]

For the second time in a couple of weeks a virtual machine will not start after a Windows restart that ran a chkdsk and found disk corrruption.viewtopic.php?f=6&t=69457&sid=82f6d00fc ... 3a8cf5e248 has the previous incident.

This time, as before, the vdi file has 0 bytes. Unlike the previous failure, there are not snapshots involved.

I am suspicious this may be related to the Dell Data Encryption Software (8.3.2.6161) I'm running, or Symantec Endpoint Protection (12.1.4112.4156--anti-virus and misc security). Both programs are mandated by work. Or maybe I'm using suspend and hibernate wrong... Windows 7 Pro laptop. Virtual Box 4.3.30. All 64 bit.

Any ideas?

[mpack]

I am not aware of anyone else having this problem, so I would certainly look to issues with your own PC. It sounds like the mere act of writing to the drive corrupts it.

Note that with a healthy drive, even pulling the power cord would not give you a 0 byte file. The only way to get that is to corrupt the host filesystem in such a way that it forgets what sectors have been allocated to a file. Probably very large or fragmented files are more susceptible because the cluster chain is not encoded entirely in a single $MFT record. Anyway there is no way for an application to cause that corruption even if buggy - that could only be possible in a very badly designed operating system.