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memilanuk
Asked: 2011-10-26 17:35:08 +0800 CST

Restoring Virtualbox machine images from old hard drive

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I recently replaced the HDD in my laptop, and re-installed Windows & Ubuntu. Now I want to restore the various virtual machines I had set up on the old HDD, which is mounted in an external USB enclosure. I can read the HDD okay, and the 'bad' spots seemed to be in the Windows partition... but whenever I try to restore the VDI files the copy errors out. I've tried drag-n-drop in Nautilus, I've tried grsync, etc. Always bombs out on the VDI files. I've copied over multi-GB dvd iso images with no problem, but the VDI files always fail the checksums.

Any ideas?

TIA,

Monte

virtualbox

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You might want to try a file recovery software like photorec. As it seems that you are working with a damaged drive.

    Another idea, did you try opening the vdi file directly from the old hdd? I am not sure how that would help to be honest, but if that drive mounts and delivers data, you could check if the vdi file is corrupted, or whether this is a balky broken hdd that is just unwilling to give up the data.

    Indeed, even if the file is quite corrupt, I would think you should be able to copy it anyway, even if you couldn't actually use it.

    I am not expert, just trying to help :-)

    Good luck.

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