It is time for me to install Ubuntu 8.10 on my laptop and I have chosen to do a claan install since I have learned a lot about setting things up since the last time I installed. I will definitely make my home directory a separate partition this time because the part that I struggle with the most is backing up my home dir. I have learned (the hard way) that I can’t simply copy my VirtualBox VM’s to another location as they will no longer work. There is a tool (vdiclone) that is supposed to make a clone in a new location but I am struggling to get it working for my MythBuntu VM. I was able to clone my WinXP VM successfully however.
Here is the output from my attempt to create the backup:
ryan@e1505-ubuntu:~/Documents$ VBoxManage clonevdi VDI/MythBuntu8.04.vdi /home/ryan/backups/vbox/MythBuntu.vdi
VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 1.6.0
(C) 2005-2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
All rights reserved.
0%…10%…20%…30%…40%…50%…60%…70%…80%…90%…FAILED
Error: failed to clone disk image. Error message: Could not copy the hard disk image ‘/home/ryan/.VirtualBox/VDI/MythBuntu8.04.vdi’ to ‘/home/ryan/backups/vbox/MythBuntu.vdi’ (VERR_DEV_IO_ERROR)
I have tried the backup from within my WinXP VM as well and get almost the same output. The only difference is that instead of seeing (VERR_DEV_IO_ERROR) I see (VERR_INVALID_PARAMETER)
I think that there must be a problem with the actual VM, but it runs with no errors so I am at a loss. I will probably just save my Windows VM so that I don’t have to worry about registering it, but will just end up rebuilding my MythBuntu VM. Oh well.