Comments on: Virtualbox – 1 differencing child hard disks

By: Mazhar

Mazhar — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 03:53:00 +0000

Thanks a million, you saved me 10 days of efforts.

By: Em

Em — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 15:16:00 +0000

That’s exactly the scenario I had. I had a snapshot that was taking too long, so I terminated the operation, but I had done a couple of other things so hadn’t tied the cause and effect together. Thanks for helping me figure out why.

By: Tim Hibbard

Tim Hibbard — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 13:56:00 +0000

Thank you!

By: Ron

Ron — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 20:51:00 +0000

worked perfectly. many many thanks

By: Mark Stimson

Mark Stimson — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 16:26:00 +0000

This post has jost dug me out of a huge hole that was driving me nuts today – many, many thanks

By: Juan

Juan — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 22:25:00 +0000

Realmente Funciona, Gracias
León, Guanajuato; México

By: Ching Ling

Ching Ling — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 11:10:00 +0000

I have a few detailed steps to contribute :

1.Load the VirtualBox Manager2.Click “New”3.fill out all the basic info4.On the “Virtual Hard Disk” tab select “use existing hard disk”5.Browse for your existing hard disk6.Select your .vdi file and click continue7.Finish the remaining steps and start up your new Virtual Machine

i copied this from this site :

http://itslennysfault.com/virtualbox-error-has-1-differencing-child-hard-disks

thanks.

By: Pepeluis

Pepeluis — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 00:40:00 +0000

thanks, very usefull, gracias muy util

By: Marc Hecht

Marc Hecht — Fri, 27 May 2011 22:29:00 +0000

Thank you em. This solution works perfectly.

So more detailed:

You go to “C:Users{Your Username}.VirtualBoxMachines{Your Machine Name}Snapshots”
and you will see a file like this: “{10c4f98c-5480-470d-9a9a-b8b63b4d3a96}.vdi”
This ist the patial harddrive that is merged by VBox for this snapshot.

So this VDI can not run alone. You have to merge it, before creating your new “Backup-Machine” as em stated before, do that with this command:

VBoxManage.exe clonehd xxxxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxxxx tempnew_drive_image.vdi

You must replace the XXXes with the UUID in the filename you saw before. On my case it was: “10c4f98c-5480-470d-9a9a-b8b63b4d3a96″ so i had to use this command like this:

VBoxManage.exe clonehd 10c4f98c-5480-470d-9a9a-b8b63b4d3a96 D:XP-New.vdi

So now create a new machine and select the new Harddrive-File as harddrive (in my case: “D:XP-New.vdi”) and run the new Machine.

It take about 8 minutes to resore my last used state of virtual harddrive.

By: El

El — Fri, 06 May 2011 07:58:00 +0000

Thank you so much, honestly, this was the most simple yet effective solution.