virtualbox.org

Hi,
I have installed oracle virtualbox Version 5.0.14 r105127 on windows 7 running on my laptop.
i installed a couple of centos vms and configured the system, powered off the vms and took snapshots and left for the day with laptop shutdown.
after powering on the laptop, when i tried to power on the vms in virtualbox, i started getting " fatal: could not read from the boot medium! system halted."
i then checked the storage settings and found that the controllers and disks were missing.

Note: these vms were running as linked clones of a master VM which however is still fine.
i have attached the screenshot of the storage configuration missing from the vm.

Please let me know the fix if anyone faced this and have overcome the problem.
thanks.

You say the parent VMs are still present. Are they in the same place? Have you moved the VM, or has Windows, perhaps, reassigned the drive letter?

That said, I would expect VBox to complain clearly about missing media, and the controllers should still be there. I've never seen this before.

Thank you for looking into this.
I verified all of the things that you mentioned.
The parent VM is in its place, and also functional - (i can power it on and login into the guest). i have not moved any VM so far. also, there is no change in drive letter. the filesystem on windows is as is when the vms were first created.
when i navigate on to the filesystem where the vm files are, i see all the disk files intact.
The vbox is not complaining about any missing config.

Do you have a backup of the affected VM? If so you can restore the .vbox file from it. Normally if there is a glitch I would suggest renaming the ".vbox-prev" (VBox's own local backup) file to ".vbox", but in this case I suspect that you'll have run this VM multiple times, so the local backups will be overwritten too.

If this were a vanilla VM then repair would be trivial, but the fact that a differencing scheme is involved makes repair rather tricky.