[vbox-dev] Where have my VMs gone ?

[Frank Mehnert]

Richard,

On Wednesday 25 February 2015 12:41:36 Kerry, Richard wrote:
> Sorry, I was taken rather by surprise and alarmed by what had happened.  And
> I have managed to find the files and manually fix the issue, so it's not
> quite so urgent, though I would like to know why it happened, and what
> exactly happened.
 
> I upgraded from 4.3.20, I think.  I'm working on Windows 7 Ultimate.
> I had opened that first (ie VBox Manager), so I'd seen my existing set of
> VMs, as expected.  I'd not used it for a while and the upgrade dialog
> appeared.  I selected OK as VBox updates are usually straightforward. 
> Downloaded the installer and ran it.  No unusual dialogs, though I did have
> to kill a couple of applications running in the background (eg itunes
> helper and async notifier and a couple of others).
 
> On running up the new version of Manager the window was empty, which was
> rather alarming ! So it had somehow during the update lost track of where
> all my VM files were. 
> With some searching I eventually found the files, and manually added them
> all.  (Suggestion - allow a folder to be selected and all VMs within it to
> be added in a single action, rather than only a single .vbox file at a
> time).
 
> So that's what happened.  As I say I have (manually) fixed the issue.  But
> it would be nice to know what happened, and to be sure it wouldn't happen
> again, for me or anyone else.

Any chance that you have the HOME environment variable set on your Windows
host? If so, does the HOME variable point to the location where your VMs
are stored? And which directory is that actually?

Frank
-- 
Dr.-Ing. Frank Mehnert | Software Development Director, VirtualBox
ORACLE Deutschland B.V. & Co. KG | Werkstr. 24 | 71384 Weinstadt, Germany

Hauptverwaltung: Riesstr. 25, D-80992 München
Registergericht: Amtsgericht München, HRA 95603
Geschäftsführer: Jürgen Kunz

Komplementärin: ORACLE Deutschland Verwaltung B.V.
Hertogswetering 163/167, 3543 AS Utrecht, Niederlande
Handelsregister der Handelskammer Midden-Niederlande, Nr. 30143697
Geschäftsführer: Alexander van der Ven, Astrid Kepper, Val Maher