I woke up one morning to discover to my horror all my virtual machines had disappeared off my Macbook! This was disconcerting to say the least! Opening VirtualBox UI revealed that it had 'lost' all my VMs - the list of available VMs in the left hand pane was totally empty.
My VMs are kept on a USB memory stick which may have been a contributory factor, but the drive had not been ejected as far as I could tell.
It was early morning, I hadn't had a coffee when I started to troubleshoot, and I stupidly decided to see if I could vagrant up my most precious project - my football statistics website. Disaster! Vagrant immediately tried to download a fresh copy of Ubuntu from the cloud so I hit ctrl-c. I'm unsure what happened next - perhaps I deleted the .vagrant directory to try and fix things; perhaps Vagrant did. It was probably the former.
Regardless of blame, I was forced to find a way of regenerating the .vagrant directory so that my football VM would load correctly. These are the steps I took.
The first thing to do is import the VMs back into the Virtual Box UI. This is quite easy - click on the Tools part of the UI which will expose the large plus sign, which will open a file system dialog box, then navigate to the directory where the VMs are stored. There will be a directory per VM - open up the directory you want according to its name, then select the .vbox file. That will import the VM. You can see I've already done this for five of my VMs. I will import more of the 30 or so left if I find I need them again!
$ VBoxManage list vms | grep Football "Football VM" {b2f47455-eee0-457c-93a4-4d0f840598e0} $ mkdir -p .vagrant/machines/default/virtualbox $ touch .vagrant/machines/default/virtualbox/id $ echo "b2f47455-eee0-457c-93a4-4d0f840598e0" > .vagrant/machines/default/virtualbox/id
$ vagrant up Bringing machine 'default' up with 'virtualbox' provider... ==> default: [vagrant-hostsupdater] Checking for host entries ==> default: [vagrant-hostsupdater] Checking for host entries ==> default: Checking if box 'geerlingguy/ubuntu1804' version '1.1.9' is up to date... ==> default: [vagrant-hostsupdater] Checking for host entries ==> default: [vagrant-hostsupdater] Checking for host entries ==> default: [vagrant-hostsupdater] Checking for host entries ==> default: Clearing any previously set forwarded ports... ==> default: Fixed port collision for 22 => 2222. Now on port 2200. ==> default: Clearing any previously set network interfaces... ==> default: Preparing network interfaces based on configuration... default: Adapter 1: nat default: Adapter 2: hostonly ==> default: Forwarding ports... default: 22 (guest) => 2200 (host) (adapter 1) ==> default: [vagrant-hostsupdater] Checking for host entries ==> default: Running 'pre-boot' VM customizations... ==> default: Booting VM... ==> default: Waiting for machine to boot. This may take a few minutes... default: SSH address: 127.0.0.1:2200 default: SSH username: vagrant default: SSH auth method: private key default: Warning: Authentication failure. Retrying... default: Warning: Authentication failure. Retrying... ^C==> default: Waiting for cleanup before exiting...
$ vagrant ssh-config Host default HostName 127.0.0.1 User vagrant Port 2200 UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null StrictHostKeyChecking no PasswordAuthentication no IdentityFile /Users/nigel/.vagrant.d/insecure_private_key IdentitiesOnly yes LogLevel FATAL
$ ssh-add -L
$ vagrant halt $ vagrant up
Your system shoud now be back! My Vagrantfile runs an Ansible playbook containing my VM config - as can be seen in the screenshot above. Once that completed I could ssh into the VM as normal. All good!!