Magicloud Wang wrote:
> In my case, my system hdd is full, so I have to move the "VirtualBox"
> directory to data disks.
> I just closed VirtualBox, and moved the directory. And vbox could not
> find
> anything. I registered the VDIs in new directory. Then I registered the
> machine.xml, it told me something wrong with vdi (which reminds me the
> horrible vbox error messages....). I removed the hdd configuration from the
> xml file, then something wrong with snapshots. I removed these, too. Then it
> worked, with all my snapshots lost. Luckly, I have backuped all file, so I
> tried and tried, till I felt tired and just deleted all snapshots.
Yes, this is what I mean when I say that some people have some sort of
trouble when they do something VBox isn't (yet) designed for. But there
are at least two ways to move VM data to another location and preserve
everything:
1. Move the complete ~/.VirtualBox directory to another hard drive and
set the VBOX_USER_HOME environment variable to point to the new location
of the .VirtualBox folder. This should not require any manual
modification of the settings files because all paths to items stored
under .VirtualBox are relative by default.
2. Move a specific VM (i.e. the ~/.VirtualBox/Machines/<VM> directory
*plus* all hard disks from ~/.VirtualBox/VDI that are attached to that
VM) to a different location. This will require the following
modifications in ~/.VirtualBox/VirtualBox.xml:
a) Look at the <MachineRegistry> section and correct the "src" attribute
of the corresponding MachineEntry element so that it points to the new
location of the moved VM's .xml file.
b) Look at the <DiskRegistry> section and correct paths to hard disks
("filePath" attributes of VirtualDiskImage and VMDKImage elements) moved
from ~/.VirtualBox/VDI so that they point to new locations.
c) Also look at child HardDisk/VirtualDiskImage elements of all
VirtualDiskImage elements corrected in step b). The "filePath" value of
these elements should look like "Machines/<VM>/Snapshots/{xxx}.vdi" and
needs to be corrected so that it points to the new location of the
Snapshots folder of the VM (which you have moved together with
everything else in step 2).
Needless to say that both 1 or 2 need to be done when VirtualBox is
stopped (no active VirtualBox front ends and no running VBoxSVC process).
As I already said in the previous post, the portable VM concept is
planned. It has a self-encapsulation feature which will let you move VMs
around. However, I can't say exactly when this feature will be
available. Definitely not in 1.5.x.
--
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kuminov
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