grub: error: out of partition

[Bouwser]

I am running Windows 7 with Virtual Box 4.3.30. I am running debian linux in the virtual machine. I have been using it for over a year and everything has worked fine until today. I did not update virtual box or my Windows machine or the linux version running on virtual box.

When I tried to start it up today, it kept saying it was already open and closed right away. After searching the internet I found a recommendation to discard the saved state, which I did.

But now when it tries to boot up, it goes to the grub prompt and gives me the error, "error: out of partition Entering rescue mode".

How can I get my virtual machine back? Any help is greatly appreciated.

Brent

[Perryg]

The error is from the guest and really has nothing to do with VirtualBox. Search for how to repair grub in rescue mode. There is even an application you can use.

[Bouwser]

Thanks for the reply. Knowing what to put into Google is half the battle. My attempts to manually fix it failed, so I downloaded super_grub2_disk and booted from that. I was able to start booting using that tool, but during the boot process it stopped and said the file system was corrupt and I had to run fdsk to fix it. I did and it chugged for a long time and asked me if I wanted to fix thousands of files. I said yes everytime. When it was done, I no longer get an error when i try to boot, but it just goes to a black screen with a clock icon for my mouse.

I'm going to try using Windows to restore my .vdi file to what it was last week and see what happens.

[Bouwser]

Restoring my .vdi file to the previous saved version using Windows (Right click on .vdi file, Properties, Previous Versions tab) fixed the issue. I would have rather been able to truly fix what went wrong and not loose any work, but this is better than nothing.

[Perryg]

Given that level of corruption I would seriously start looking at the actual hard drive for issues. Smart drive should tell you the conditions of the blocks but it sounds like you may be heading for a serious crash. Be sure to backup important data to a separate drive.