Thursday, April 14, 2011

Silly, mindboggling obvious virtualbox/clonezilla error

Chalk this up to a bit of overthinking, or ... something.

See, I have this USB external 2TB hard drive, and on it, I have clonezilla images. Since that's ample size, I decided that I'd conserve space and make VirtualBox VDIs from the images and store them on the same drive... yes, if you're playing along, you'll understand what happened.

It appears that VirtualBox removes the Host mounted drive and attaches it to the guest image. All of a sudden, I can't do anything to the VB VDI /dev/sda because ... it doesn't exist anymore, because the usb 2TB drive is mounted to the guest, removing the .vdi.

(In case you didn't catch this: Let's say the 2TB drive is mounted on Windows as L:, and the drive for the virtual machine is in L:\drive.vdi When VirtualBox runs, L: disappears as the 2TB drive is mounted for clonezilla recovery. Boom. L:\drive.vdi gone.)

Temp solution: put the .vdi on another drive until the images are converted, then move them back.

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