Hi all,

I'm running Ubuntu and wiped my machine to do a fresh install of Hardy Heron. I've got everything up and running, except there is one file I cannot copy back onto my hard drive from my external USB drive. It's a VirtualBox hard drive image (.vdi) file that is about 16GB.

When I click on file properties it shows its correct size (and I know the original copy completed because I sat through it). But when I try to copy it back in the Nautilus file browser, it always comes up with this error at 2.0GB into the transfer:

Error while copying "Windows Vista.vdi"

There was an error copying the file into /home/username/.VirtualBox/VDI/WindowsVista.VDI

When I click show more details, it says

Error reading from file: Input/output error

I tried being clever and creating an archive file to transfer it over, but it would never complete creating the archive. I also tried creating an ISO file with KISO, but that showed that the vdi file was only 3.6 GB.

I've also tried using dd copy to get my entire usb hard drive onto my hard disk as an image file. I type in the command:

sudo dd if="/media/Bodhi Drive" of=image.img

And I get this error message:

dd: reading `/media/Bodhi Drive': Is a directory
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes (0 B) copied, 0.00070268 s, 0.0 kB/s

Any ideas?
Jugney

When you copied it to your usb drive did you unmount the drive with the safely remove option? or did you just unplug it? It seems the file write wasn't fully complete and what you've got there is a corrupt vdi file. Are you able to use that file in VirtualBox from the usb drive?

Thanks for the tip about trying to load the virtual disk directly off the USB drive. I tried that and in fact it was broken. So maybe I didn't unmount it. Oh well. I've alraedy reinstalled Windows and the Quickbooks software I use, now I just need to re-enter a couple account-opening deposits...

Jugney

It's always better to use the 'safely remove' option to ensure all the data has infact been written to the drive. This is especially true when writing large pieces of data. Also it doesn't hurt to double check the data is complete by reloading it back from the backup medium before removing it.