I have received notice that my workstation, currently running Win7 Pro, is to be completely reimaged with Win10. My biggest concern is saving my VBox guest machine – 10 of them and all critical to my own testing.
High level plan is to copy the directories containing the VMs to an external drive. Then after the re-image, install VBox, re-create the VM “home” directory (the specified default location for placing the VMs), copy the directories back from the external, then ‘plug them in’ with Vbox Manager -> Maciine -> Add …
To test this out, I did the following:
- created a VM named ‘vbmigtest’ running Oracle Linux.
- Zipped up the entire ‘vbmigtest’ directory, then deleted it
- Deleted the ‘vbmigtest’ machine, selecting to ‘including files’, from the VBox Manager navigation tree.
- Checked the Virtual Media Manager to insure there were no virtual disks for ‘vbmigtest’ still hanging around in VBox’s internal inventory.
- Unzipped the ‘vbmigest’ directory back to its original location.
- From the Vbox Manager menu, selected ‘Machine’ -> ‘Add ..’
- Drilled down to ‘vbmigtest’ and selected ‘vbmigtest.vbox’.
Got this message in a pop-up:
Failed to open virtual machine located in C:/VMLab/VirtualBoxVMs/vbmigtest/vbmigtest.vbox.
Medium 'C:\VMLab\VirtualBoxVMs\vbmigtest\vbmigtest.vdi' cannot be closed because it is still attached to 1 virtual machines.
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Result Code:
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VBOX_E_OBJECT_IN_USE (0x80BB000C)
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Component:
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MediumWrap
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Interface:
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IMedium {4afe423b-43e0-e9d0-82e8-ceb307940dda}
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Callee:
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IVirtualBox {9570b9d5-f1a1-448a-10c5-e12f5285adad}
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Callee RC:
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VBOX_E_OBJECT_NOT_FOUND (0x80BB0001)
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And from there, going back to Virtual Media Manager I see this new entry that was not there before I opened ‘machine .. new’. Showing both the ‘information’ and ‘attributes’ tab.
So I'm obviously overlooking something that needs to be cleaned out to make VBox forget there was ever a machine named 'vbmigtest' ... just as it would be for a new installation on a new computer.