virtualbox.org

Hi

I am having an irritating problem getting a Windows 10 VM working on my macbook pro laptop.

I needed to use the free upgrade from a licensed W7 Pro route, and after a lot of struggling got the upgrade to work. The problem is that I did it on my Mac Pro, without realising that when I copied it across to the machine I actually want it to run on it would create a new machine UUID and W10 would thus need reactivating - which it won't do because the upgrade token has already been spent.

What I did to copy it was copy the vdi file over, create a new machine and used the VDI file. Unfortunately, before importing the vdi file I also renamed it, as its previous name, being an upgrade, was Windows 7. I thought in future this would confuse me, so I changed it to Windows 10. It booted happily, all looked fine and then it told me it needed to reactivate and that's when the trouble started.

There's no way to activate it without paying microsoft £190 for new license, which I didn't want to do.

OK, I thought - let's delete this VM and try again - copy the files over complete with vbox file, don't change the name, use the Add Machine function instead. This gave me an error on boot:

Failed to open a session for the virtual machine Windows 10 Professional.
Could not open the medium '/Volumes/Nifty128GB/VirtualBox VMs/Windows 10 Professional 64 Bit/Windows 10 Professional 64 Bit.vdi'.
VD: error VERR_FILE_NOT_FOUND opening image file '/Volumes/Nifty128GB/VirtualBox VMs/Windows 10 Professional 64 Bit/Windows 10 Professional 64 Bit.vdi' (VERR_FILE_NOT_FOUND).
Result Code:
NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005)
Component:
MediumWrap
Interface:
IMedium {4afe423b-43e0-e9d0-82e8-ceb307940dda}

So even though I had deleted the old VM, it is still looking for the hdd with the changed file name.

OK I thought. Delete the VM again, uninstall virtualbox using AppZapper to get rid of all associate prefs etc, then try again.

Nope, still doesn't work, still remembering the old disk.

So how can I make this work? Or am I now stuck with a VM that only works on the mac I don't need it on! I presume I can make the Add machine route work if only I can get VB to forget the first attempts?

Thanks in advance for any help.

If you delete the VM and the physical files then the VM is totally forgotten.

I would also look to the actual error message and your copy medium. If you used a FAT formatted USB stick then it can't hold files larger than 4GB, which may explain why you have a "File not found" error on the VDI.

Thanks for the reply.

It doesn't seem to work that way. I deleted all the physical files and rebooted then started again but it definitely remembered the machine.

Then I deleted the files, the app and used app zapper to delete prefs etc, then reinstalled Virtualbox but it still remembered the VM. Somewhere it is keeping a record.

I copied the files across over the network, not on a stick.

As it happens, the vm is intended to live on a 128gb MicroSD care in ExFat format - but that has nothing to do with the problem as I have been using that for VMs for at least a year.

mpack is correct. If you actually deleted all the VirtualBox files then it is not possible for VirtualBox to remember anything. You might as well say " I formatted my drive, did a clean install of OSX and VirtualBox still remembers the VM". Obviously you are not removing "everything".

Aside from the "VirtualBox VMs" folder, there are only two VirtualBox folders…
/Library/Application Support/VirtualBox
~/Library/VirtualBox
If you delete both folders all VB files will be history other than the VirtualBox VMs folder.