For the past few months I have been using Sun’s VirtualBox as my preferred VM software. With the shift to x64 computing that is in full flow, the latest operating systems and servers such as SharePoint and Project Server are moving over toe x64 only. Unfortunately Microsoft has made the choice to only offer support for x64 virtual machines via Hyper-V on their server platforms and doesn’t currently offer any consumer product that will run x64 guests.
Today I had two virtual machines chugging along when we had a power outage. Yes I know I should have bought a UPS, but to be honest I would rather spend the money on a SSD 🙂 When the power came back, I couldn’t get the VM’s to boot back up, getting a “Could not get the storage format of the hard disk” error:
After a quick Bing, I stumbled upon someone suggesting mounting the VHD in Windows 7 which may fix the problem. Low and behold it did. So in an effort to give something back, here are the steps to ‘fix’ the vhd in Windows 7.
1. In Computer Management, Choose Action and Attach VHD.
2.In the ‘Attach Virtual Hard Disk’ dialogue, choose the location of the disk and click OK
3.When the VHD has mounted you will see it in the list, with a blue icon indicating it’s a VHD
The process of Attaching will have fixed the VHD, so now you need to do is detach the drive and it should work in VirtualBox again 🙂
4. Detach the drive by right clicking on it and choosing Detach VHD:
Click Ok in the Detach Virtual Hard Drive dialog, do NOT choose the ‘Delete the virtual hard disk file after removing the disk’ option.
The VHD should now be fixed and ready to use in VirtualBox once again.
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