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Maybe what I'm trying to do doesn't make sense, if so please bear with me, I am not a Unix guy at all.

I mostly do .Net development in a Windows 7 virtualbox. I use the host for simple things such as web browsing, skype, chat, etc. All things that are fantastically available on Ubuntu which I in many ways prefer. So this has been begging the question for a while: why even use Windows on the host, seems like a Linux host would use less resources (untested) and allow my Windows VMs to run better while allowing me to do my non-development stuff in an interface I prefer.

So easiest way to do this - I downloaded wubi and installed Ubuntu. I installed in it Virtualbox, and then start add and start my VM to get this message:

Failed to open a session for the virtual machine VS2010

Could not open the medium
'/host/Users/George Mauer/Virtualbox VMs/VS2010/C:/Users/George Mauer/.VirtualBox/HardDisks/VS2010.vdi;

VD: error VERR_FILE_NOT_FOUND opening image file

'/host/Users/George Mauer/Virtualbox VMs/VS2010/C:/Users/George Mauer/.VirtualBox/HardDisks/VS2010.vdi;
(VERR_FILE_NOT_FOUND).

You see what's going on? With wubi, the windows drive gets mounted at /host/ but virtualbox is for some reason appending an absolute path! I would very much like to use the same exact VM file since it would retain Snapshots and I would be able to use it in either windows or Ubuntu mode. However, even if I try to simply mount the drives into a new VM I get an error:

Failed to open the hard disk /host/Users/George Mauer/.VirtualBox/HardDisks/VS2010.vdi.

Cannot register the hard disk '/host/Users/George Mauer/.VirtualBox/HardDisks/VS2010.vdi' {guid...} because a hard disk
'/host/Users/George Mauer/VirtualBox VMs/VS2010/C:/Users/George Mauer.VirtualBox/HardDisks/VS2010.vdi with UUID {guid...} already exists.

This is especially odd since this worked fine with my recently created Android VM, though this might have something to do with the fact that VirtualBox recently changed their default VM storage locations.

Any idea how to fix this? My Linux-fu is weak but I seem to remember from CS class something about symbolic links that might be relevant here?

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With version 4 of VirtualBox, the VM definitions are now grouped with their default-created .vdi (virtual hard drives). The hidden ".VirtualBox" directory is now replaced with the "VirtualBox VMs" directory as the default location when creating new VMs.

You might check to see if that may be the situation you are facing...

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  • It is, and after erasing all snapshots I WAS able to set up a VM with that HD on Linux but the problem is still that I want to use the SAME file from either Linux or Windows, otherwise it will be a nightmare if I take snapshots in one and not the other.
    – George Mauer
    Commented Jun 27, 2011 at 21:54
  • Sharing snapshots between type hypervisor configurations is probably not supported as each hypervisor configuration needs to maintain its tracking of the snapshots (e.g. snapshot count and where to find the snapshot(s)).
    – user48838
    Commented Jun 27, 2011 at 22:04
  • Hmm, I can see all that information in the .vbox files. I'm not sure what else it would need to keep track of. Additionally, this actually did work with an android vbox install (that I created after v4) which had a snapshot.
    – George Mauer
    Commented Jun 28, 2011 at 0:07
  • Does the android configuration still work across both hypervisor configurations? If so, then you should look into mimicking its hypervisor configurations for the other VMs.
    – user48838
    Commented Jun 28, 2011 at 7:00

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