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My host is WinXP SP3, and I have 2 VMs, one Ubuntu and the other WinXP SP2. Everything was shut down last night when I went to bed. This morning, the WinXP VM was showing inaccessible. Everything is greyed out except for the refresh button that does nothing. No access to 'Settings' or anything else. How to I get it back instead of creating another one. The VDI file is still there.

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Official VirtualBox forums (where you're more likely to find help quickly) are at: forums.virtualbox.org – Brian Knoblauch Jan 4 '10 at 13:20
Add your comment as an answer - it may get accepted. You never know. – cometbill Jan 4 '10 at 14:33
More precisely, on Windows check the %USERPROFILE%\.VirtualBox\HardDisks folder. – Goyuix Jan 4 '10 at 15:55
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3 Answers

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Worse comes to worst, locate the VDI file that represents your virtual hard disk, and create a new VM using that as your hard drive. You'll lose any snapshots, of course.

The default directory for VDI files is c:\documents and settungs\\application data.virtualbox\HardDisks, I believe. (I use a Linux host and don't currently have a Windows-hosting box to check.)

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if the reason is indeed the newly installed version of VirtualBox, then old VDIs and snapshots simply do not work. – Molly7244 Jan 4 '10 at 16:04
CarlF wins the jackpot. Am writing this from the VM now. So I guess it wasn't the newly installed version of VB. Thanks all. – funbi_grace Jan 4 '10 at 16:59
To Molly: I've used VirtualBox for some time and never actually had an "incompatible format" problem on upgrades. Has that ever been a real problem? – CarlF Jan 5 '10 at 4:48
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the information is stored in XML files, are they still there?

check c:\documents and settungs\<user>\application data\.virtualbox\machines

did you receive an automatic update? sometimes new versions render old virtual machines useless, in this case uninstall virtualbox, reinstall the older version and disable automatic update.

older versions can be obtained from FileHippo.com

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Directory is still there with Logs directory and the xml file. hm. I installed the latest version of VB over the old one, and although I can't say for sure, I think I have restarted the VM a couple of time since then. It's worth a try to go back to the older version. Will revert. – funbi_grace Jan 4 '10 at 15:08
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It happened to me to day, I shutdown a guest operating system, and the virtual box manager told be that it was not accessible.

Luckily I just closed the manager and restarted it and all was well.

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