virtualbox.org

Hi, all.

I'm having a lot of trouble trying to copy a VM from an old computer.

The old host system:

Linux Mint 13 64bit
VirtualBox 4.3.8 PUEL

On this system I have a VM (Windows XP), with 15GB of hard disk, dinamically allocated, that I simply cannot copy or clone.

Every time that I try to make a copy, clone the complete VM ou clone only the .vdi file (sometimes converting it to another format), I get his error:

Could not create the clone medium '/media/....vdi' (VERR_DEV_IO_ERROR).

VBOX_E_FILE_ERROR (0x80BB0004)
Component:
Appliance
Interface:
IAppliance {3059cf9e-25c7-4f0b-9fa5-3c42e441670b}

I also get the same error when I tried to compact the .vdi with vboxmanage modifyhd command.

Progress state: VBOX_E_FILE_ERROR
VBoxManage: error: Failed to compact hard disk
VBoxManage: error: Could not compact medium '/home/....vdi' (VERR_DEV_IO_ERROR)
VBoxManage: error: Details: code VBOX_E_FILE_ERROR (0x80bb0004), component Medium, interface IMedium
VBoxManage: error: Context: "int handleModifyHardDisk(HandlerArg*)" at line 582 of file VBoxManageDisk.cpp

But I could increase the size of the .vdi, from 15GB to 16GB

I've tried copy from Nautilus, copy from terminal, copy with rsync, boot with another linux distros and copy with its tools, and nothing works.

Sometimes I get an 14 GB file (the original .vdi had 15 GB), but I'm unable to use this new corrupted .vdi.

I also performed a FSCK on the partition where this .vdi is stored and nothing appeared.

The interesting detail: this VM is still working perfectly!

I have a old copy of this machine, but is almost two years old, and I would like to use the updated one that I'm trying to copy.

Any ideas?

This usually means corruption of some kind but you might be able to copy it if you compress it first. Compress the entire folder and then see if you can copy it to the new location. If it works then decompress it and place the entire folder in the VirtualBox VMs folder and use the add feature to add it back into the new host.

I've forget to mention that I've also tried to compress the VM folder and the .vdi file.

But, now You talked about this, I noticed that I only tried to compress this VM to some kind of external storage, not to the host computer hd itself.

I will try it tomorrow.

Thanks for the tip, Perryg.