

This format is useful if you have one disk image that you want to use as a master between multiple VMs. More than one VM at a time can use a "multi-attach" disk, but each VM has its own separate differencing image.

In both of these cases, make sure to completely power off all VMs that have been using the corrupted drive - don't just suspend! Then, perform the recovery from one VirtualBox VM, preferably the one with the most memory. ("Write-through" disks are like normal disks, but with no snapshotting.) A drive marked as "shareable" that multiple machines use at once may have been damaged by any of the VMs attached to it, which makes troubleshooting harder. Most of the time, VHDs are classified as "normal," which means only one VM at a time can use the disk in question, and the source of the damage is typically that single VM. Setting up VirtualBox remote display access Oracle VM VirtualBox can create several different kinds of VHD images, and the differences between them affect your VM recovery.Ĭreating virtual machines with Oracle VM VirtualBox Where's the VHD?įirst, you need to know what kind of disk image you're dealing with and on which VM it's located. Below are some challenges you might encounter with these disaster recovery methods. As I began my own VirtualBox VM recovery, I realized there were more details than I initially thought. The second also works, but I'm a bigger fan of the first because there's less chance for you to mess things up.Īs you can imagine, the devil is in the details. The first approach is slightly safer because you minimize the number of changes being made to both the VHD and its VM. Attach the VHD to another VM as a secondary drive, boot this other VM, and recover the data from there.Boot the VM using some kind of recovery media, access the VHD and copy whatever data you need to another VHD or across the network to a share.There are two basic VirtualBox VM recovery options in this situation: The best thing to do was to recover the VHD, pull what I needed out of there and cut my losses. With my mission-critical data on the VM's virtual hard disk (VHD), the prospect of redoing a lot of work just to re-create the data wasn't appealing. If you're using VirtualBox for desktop virtualization, you need to know about these VM recovery methods that could save your data. I was using VirtualBox to host virtual desktops, and unfortunately, the data was hosted on the system's virtual machines (VMs) rather than externally. Oracle VM VirtualBox is a hosted platform that can be used for server or desktop virtualization.
