Questions[vboxmanage](server)

I am using VirtualBox 4.1.18 and had a virtual machine running Windows 8 RC with a single VHD, which was initially sized at 25GB (too small!).

After installing the OS and some applications I ran out of disk space so shut down the guest and then used this command to resize the VHD to 80GB:

C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox> .\VBoxManage.exe modifyhd "D:\VirtualBox VMs\Windows 8 RC\Windows 8 RC.vhd" --resize 81920
0%...10%...20%...30%...40%...50%...60%...70%...80%...90%...100%
C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox> .\VBoxManage.exe showhdinfo "D:\VirtualBox VMs\Windows 8 RC\Windows 8 RC.vhd"
UUID:                 03fb26e7-d8bb-49b5-8cc2-1dc350750e64
Accessible:           yes
Logical size:         81920 MBytes
Current size on disk: 24954 MBytes
Type:                 normal (base)
Storage format:       VHD
Format variant:       dynamic default
In use by VMs:        Windows 8 RC (UUID: a6e6aa57-2d3a-421b-8042-7aae566e3e0b)
Location:             D:\VirtualBox VMs\Windows 8 RC\Windows 8 RC.vhd

So far so good. However, when I started the guest up again I got the dreaded:

Fatal: No bootable medium found! system halted

If I boot into GParted it shows a single 80GB drive as "unallocated". The option to scan for and attempt to repair a filesystem doesn't find anything.

I also tried cloning the VHD into a VDI file, just in case that magically fixed it:

C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox> .\VBoxManage.exe clonehd "D:\VirtualBox VMs\Windows 8 RC\Windows 8 RC.vhd" "D:\VirtualBox VMs\Windows 8 RC\Windows 8 RC.vdi" --format VDI
0%...10%...20%...30%...40%...50%...60%...70%...80%...90%...100%
Clone hard disk created in format 'VDI'. UUID: baf0c2c4-362f-4f6c-846a-37bb1ffc027b
C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox> .\VBoxManage.exe showhdinfo "D:\VirtualBox VMs\Windows 8 RC\Windows 8 RC.vdi"
UUID:                 baf0c2c4-362f-4f6c-846a-37bb1ffc027b
Accessible:           yes
Logical size:         81920 MBytes
Current size on disk: 24798 MBytes
Type:                 normal (base)
Storage format:       VDI
Format variant:       dynamic default
In use by VMs:        Windows 8 RC (UUID: a6e6aa57-2d3a-421b-8042-7aae566e3e0b)
Location:             D:\VirtualBox VMs\Windows 8 RC\Windows 8 RC.vdi

Is there anything else I could try to recover the drive?

No, I don't have a backup :(

My host OS is Windows 7 64-bit.

I can see that I can start and stop a vm with virtualBox using VBoxManage. I m not sure this is the tool I need.

I m trying to write a script that

1. Will boot the VM (different flavours of Windows)
2. Run a custom piece of software (in my case an installer) and record the results of this
3. power of the VM

I am aware of the existence of the web services and the API, however I couldnt find much online about point 2.

I would really appreciate some direction on this. ie should I use vboxmanage to start and stop the VMs and then run the installers in some other way? alternatively should I use the COM API, if so, any ideas of some samples on how to do step 2?

Not familiar with VirtualBox at all. But I can write code.

UPDATE: Should I be looking at Vagrant or Puppet? As you can probably guess this is a test suite for installers, and it would be great to be able to re use it.

Thanks

I have this VM (ubuntu server 10.04 @ vbox 4.1.12) and I want to attach a virtual disk on it, but on the fly. I know that I can add more disks by powering off the machine and then attach them, but what I want to know is if its possible to attach it in a powered on machine.

Thanks in advance and sorry for my bad english :)

I'd like to run some servers as VBoxHeadless machines. NAT networking with port mapping seems more than enough for me and using bridging is unnecessary. But how can I specify an IP address I want a particular machine to use?

I've only found VBoxManage modifyvm --natnet1 command, which I can use to specify a subnet (as 192.168.0/24 for example). But I want to specify an exact IP address.

I'm currently testing Ubuntu 10.04, and have install the VirtualBox software. I have also installed Ubuntu 10.04 as a VirtualBox guest running on the host system.

I've installed the VirtualBox Utils into the guest OS, as follows:

sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose-guest-utils

What I want to be able to do is to initiate a controlled shutdown of the guest, from the host system using the VBoxManage command.

I first tried this command:

VBoxManage controlvm guest poweroff

which worked, but didn't initiate a controlled shutdown, it effectively pulls the plug on the guest.

I've since found that this command should do the trick:

VBoxManage controlvm guest acpipowerbutton

but this doesn't appear to do anything.

Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong?

p.s. I don't want to use SSH & Certificates to do this, as I'm also going to be running Windows guests, and I want the solution to work for all guests.

Edit: Just found this post which suggests installing acpid into the guest, however having just done this and rebooted the system, it doesn't appear to have made any difference, as the host still appears to accept the command, but nothing happens to the guest.

Second Edit: acpi powerbutton event config as follows:

# /etc/acpi/events/powerbtn
# This is called when the user presses the power button and calls
# /etc/acpi/powerbtn.sh for further processing.

# Optionally you can specify the placeholder %e. It will pass
# through the whole kernel event message to the program you've
# specified.

# We need to react on "button power.*" and "button/power.*" because
# of kernel changes.

event=button[ /]power
action=/etc/acpi/powerbtn.sh

The above shell script (/etc/acpi/powerbtn.sh) exists