Walking Randomly

I like VirtualBox and find myself using it more and more often but had a little problem with it this morning that took me a few minutes to solve. This post is essentially a note to self. It would be a bonus if it turned out to help someone else too (please let me know if it does).

So I am using version 1.5.6 of VirtualBox on Ubuntu 8.04 (hardy Heron) and I wanted to clone a vdi image to save me from having to go through the Operating System installation from scratch for a particular virtual machine. I navigated to the directory containing the vdi images and issued the command

VBoxManage clonevdi ./clean_machine.vdi ./copy_of_cleanmachine.vdi

which resulted in the error

Text = Could not access hard disk image ‘/home/mike/.VirtualBox/clean_machine.vdi’ (VERR_FILE_NOT_FOUND)

The file definitely was there so this confused me for a bit. It turns out that you need to provide the full path to your vdi files – not just the relative path. Something like

VBoxManage clonevdi /home/mike/.VirtualBox/VDI/clean_machine.vdi /home/mike/.VirtualBox/VDI/copy_of_cleanmachine.vdi

did the trick.

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