I recently reinstalled Ubuntu Linux and really didn't want to recreate and reinstall the guest OS and applications all over again. Each time I've tried this in the past, I quickly became frustrated and did just that - reinstalled it all. This time I found a cool trick to get the existing VDI to work. The VDI was originally created with VirtualBox version 1.5.6. Since the Ubuntu team seems to be leaving updates out of the main repository for VirtualBox, I decided to go with the newest release 1.6.2 (addition information on this).

At this stage I'm going on the assumption you'll be working from a backup of your .VirtualBox directory.

First thing to do is install VirtualBox 1.6.2. The installation should default to ~/.VirtualBox. Once installed you'll have a VDI directory and a Machines directory inside.

Next copy your old VDI file that you want restored into the .VirtualBox/VDI directory. Also copy the appropriate Machine directory to .VirtualBox/Machines.

Open your old VirtualBox.xml file with a text editor. Copy/Paste the old <MachineRegistry> entries into the newVirtualBox.xml file. Do the same in the <HardDisks> section with the hard drive definition. It'll look something like;

       <HardDisk uuid="{98f47212-9b35-40f6-4689-87c52038cf5d}" type="normal">
          <VirtualDiskImage filePath="/home/user/.VirtualBox/VDI/WinXP.vdi"/>
        </HardDisk>

Now all you should need to do is start VirtualBox. The definitions for your virtual machine should be in the list. Start it normally - compute virtually!!

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