Matt Cheddar wrote: >> 1. You said "in VirtualBox i removed the .iso in the CD/DVD >> section". Do you mean that you opened the Virtual Disk Manager, >> selected the unaccessible .iso there and pressed the Remove button? >> It's not possible because the Remove button should stay disabled if >> the .iso is mounted to some VM(s). > > Yes this is what i did. For some reason the remove button was not > disabled!
If you happen to experience this problem once more, please collect details. >> UUID for .iso images is randomly generated when they are >> registered, so every time you register a (even the same) image >> file, it gets a new UUID. As opposed, hard disk images (.vdi) store >> UUIDs inside, so registering the same image twice will give you the >> same UUID. > > Ok that would explain why i couldn't convince it the .iso was mounted > again. Thanks for clearing that up :-) I wonder if some option to > choose the UUID would help. Perhaps that isn't necessary though when > whatever caused the problem in the first place is tracked down. I think so. If you talk about moving VMs from one host to another, the import/export feature should definitely take care of it automatically. And anyway, people who's still in a need to alter UUID may always edit the .xml file directly. >>> Why couldn't i start the VM even when the .iso was not found (but >>> with it unmounted of course)? >> Because it wasn't just that the .iso was not found -- the integrity >> of the VM .xml was broken (it couldn't resolve UUID to a file name >> which should normally never happen). > > But if i have moved or deleted the .iso like in this case then surely > it can happen and it doesn't seem unreasonable (in my limited > knowledge!) that in this case the .iso is unmounted when the VM is > started (perhaps with a message box explaining the UUID is not found > and confirming the user would like to do this). As we've already concluded, the above problem is a result of a bug or a crash. Normally, moving or deleting media will not make the VM inaccessible, it will only make it impossible to start until its media configuration is corrected by the user. I believe that doing things like that (changing the VM configuration) automatically behind the user's back is not correct, no matter what reason it is done for. >>> Why didn't modifyvm work as expected? >> >> It worked as expected. When inegrity of a VM is broken it is placed >> to a special "limited functionality" state seen as "inaccessible" >> in the GUI. This is done to 1) prevent the whole VirtualBox >> application from being unusable in case of a failure with a single >> VM, and 2) give you an opportunity to manually fix the problem and >> then try to reload the VM again w/o restarting the whole VirtualBox >> server, or, alternatively let you unregister the failed VM if you >> don't want to deal with it. > > Ok i think i've been taking a different attitude over mounted .iso's. > I've been considering them just like a disk or a cd drive that i can > remove and still start the VM, just as if i did so with a real > machine. That's right. With the only difference is that "remove" means "unmount CD media in the VM configuration", not "delete the media from the host machine". > The problem with this, at least for me, is that i keep my .iso's on a > separate partition and use them with various different operating > systems and with various software and something must click in my head > that once mounted they effectively belong to VirtualBox. I do not > instantly think 'i must check with VirtualBox that i can delete this > .iso' before doing so - although perhaps i should :-) It should not be a problem at all. Once you've moved/deleted it, GUI will inform you (upon startup, or when you open the VDM, or when you start a VM in question) and you can simply re-register missing media or detach it from the VM. -- Dmitry A. Kuminov _______________________________________________ vbox-users mailing list [email protected] http://vbox.innotek.de/mailman/listinfo/vbox-users
