Monthly Archives: February 2012

VirtualBox could not open the medium: you’re not the old you

I recently had reason to restart an old virtual machine on VirtualBox running on my Ubuntu machine, and was presented with the error:

Failed to start the virtual machine XP Install 2.

Medium ‘/home/net2/.VirtualBox/Machines/XP Install 2/Snapshots/{70eab271-a63d-4bff-aa7b-8ac8b713e3b6}.vdi’ is not accessible. Could not open the medium ‘/home/net2/.VirtualBox/Machines/XP Install 2/Snapshots/{70eab271-a63d-4bff-aa7b-8ac8b713e3b6}.vdi’.
VD: error VERR_FILE_NOT_FOUND opening image file ‘/home/net2/.VirtualBox/Machines/XP Install 2/Snapshots/{70eab271-a63d-4bff-aa7b-8ac8b713e3b6}.vdi’ (VERR_FILE_NOT_FOUND).

I figured that somehow the backup had been hosed, as it had been through a couple of restores and system migrations. A ls of the above failed with

ls: cannot access /home/net2/.VirtualBox/Machines/XP: No such file or directory
ls: cannot access Install: No such file or directory
ls: cannot access 2/Snapshots/{70eab271-a63d-4bff-aa7b-8ac8b713e3b6}.vdi: No such file or directory

And then it occured to me that I was running under a different username now. As such:

cd /home
sudo ln -s josh net2

solved the problem with the computer is completely fooled into believing that net2 is still a user on this machine. Well, for the purposes of VirtualBox anyway.

Android: Ice Cream Sandwich upgrades

Computerworld has a list (that they are continuing to update) of which devices are getting Google Android 4 (Ice cream sandwich).

Alas, there’s no news of some phones, including my HTC Desire S. (The Desire non-S is looking very iffy, apparently.) There is a hacky way of getting it onto a Desire S… if you’re willing to forego being able to use the camera. No thanks. No doubt some other devices have this option available too, for the hardcore.

The bigger picture on this is that with a myriad of phone manufacturers, Android updates are a lot more hit and miss than Apple’s, where Apple’s absolute control clearly benefits customers by making operating system updates available quickly on all recent models of phone.