Help With Moving VM's
Posted: 19. Jan 2018, 05:55
I am relatively new to all of this but i have ventured from the shallow end so to speak & I need some advice. Please bear with me. I will describe my first problem with moving a VM & how I solved it. Then I need advice on avoiding the problem to start with.
I originally created my VM as simply a test to see if I could get it all to work. After following some tutorials, etc - I got it to work & installed my first working OS on a VM. Now I want to create a VM that I will be actually using. the problem is, I created it in the wrong default directory/drive. After some more research & guides, I have been able to make some of the changes but I am not actually able to move the virtual drive itself. Let me briefly outline what I did.
1) I removed the VM (right click remove only not delete)
2) I powered virtualbox down.
3) I moved the (4) files in the default machine directory for this VM to the directory of my choice (.vbox, ,vdmk, -flat.vmdk,.vbox-prev)
4) I reopened virtualbox - under preferences I changed the virtualbox default location of VM's to the folder I want all my VM's to be in. My VM is now in this directory.
5) I used the Machine / add option from the virtualbox menu. I choose the .vbox of the moved drive.
Everything seemed to look ok until I looked under the VM settings / storage. The actual hard drive had a yellow triangle on it. I moused over the drive & the tooltip told me that some snapshots were not accessable, etc. I undid everything & put the VM back into its original place. I opened virtualbox, deleted my one snapshot. Then I moved everything back & reset up my VM in the new location. Everything worked fine then. I even made a new snapshot & resored to it. It all looks ok now.
The original snapshot directory was in the wrong place. When I tried to change the location of them in settings, I got the warning - something about merging different snapshots of vms & that must delete them first before changing the default snapshot directory. So, everytime I move a VM, I will have to delete all my snapshots? If so, this presents some serious problems for me. Please advise.
I originally created my VM as simply a test to see if I could get it all to work. After following some tutorials, etc - I got it to work & installed my first working OS on a VM. Now I want to create a VM that I will be actually using. the problem is, I created it in the wrong default directory/drive. After some more research & guides, I have been able to make some of the changes but I am not actually able to move the virtual drive itself. Let me briefly outline what I did.
1) I removed the VM (right click remove only not delete)
2) I powered virtualbox down.
3) I moved the (4) files in the default machine directory for this VM to the directory of my choice (.vbox, ,vdmk, -flat.vmdk,.vbox-prev)
4) I reopened virtualbox - under preferences I changed the virtualbox default location of VM's to the folder I want all my VM's to be in. My VM is now in this directory.
5) I used the Machine / add option from the virtualbox menu. I choose the .vbox of the moved drive.
Everything seemed to look ok until I looked under the VM settings / storage. The actual hard drive had a yellow triangle on it. I moused over the drive & the tooltip told me that some snapshots were not accessable, etc. I undid everything & put the VM back into its original place. I opened virtualbox, deleted my one snapshot. Then I moved everything back & reset up my VM in the new location. Everything worked fine then. I even made a new snapshot & resored to it. It all looks ok now.
The original snapshot directory was in the wrong place. When I tried to change the location of them in settings, I got the warning - something about merging different snapshots of vms & that must delete them first before changing the default snapshot directory. So, everytime I move a VM, I will have to delete all my snapshots? If so, this presents some serious problems for me. Please advise.