Question: I’m using VirtualBox hosted on Windows 7 and the physical hard drive that one of my VM’s VDI file was on got completely borked and no longer exists. ?
The problem is that now I can delete neither virtual hard drive nor VM since the attempt to delete the VDI file gives me an error stating that VirtualBox can’t find the file and of course, I can’t delete the VM without first releasing (or deleting) the VDI file that that machine was using.
UPDATE: ?Note that I’ve also removed all storage attachments and the snapshots cannot be deleted for the same reason–it can’t find the files (because of the non-existent hard drive).
Does anyone know of a solution?
Answer: Delete your VM xml files on Hard Disk. They are located by default in C:UsersYOUR_NAME.VirtualBoxMachines.
After deleting, you’ll still receive strange erros messages in Virtualbox. This is because some info about your vms are inside C:UsersYOUR_NAME.VirtualBoxVirtualBox.xml.
If you don’t mind losing some global configuration in your VirtualBox, just delete this file. Virtualbox will create another if it doesn’t exist.
If you just want to remove a specific VM, you have to edit Virtualbox.xml in some xml editor (notepad is fine. notepad++ is better since it has syntax highlighting).
You’ll find these fields:
Remove the MachineEntry from the desired VM. If you just have one VM and want to remove everything, just leave the tags empty. For example:
…and you’re done. I just tested everythong here and it works flawlessly. If you want to avoid problems, backup your xml configuration files from VirtualBox and specific VMs.
(I didn’t mention about snapshots, but I believe it’s the same principle.)