I’ve been using the open source virtualization software VirtualBox lately to run my Drupal development environments. I started using image from the Turnkey Linux project, until I discovered a project on Drupal.org called Quickstart. Quickstart is regularly updated and comes pre-configured with a variety of useful tools for Drupal developers, including Drush, XDebug, git, and a whole lot more. It even includes its own Drush plugins that make spinning up new sites a snap.
While Quickstart has been a big productivity boost, VirtualBox sometimes leaves a bit to be desired. In essence, it’s finicky. A lot of the problems seem to be related to the screen, either it will stop resizing properly or appear jumbled.
More recently, I’ve started having problems with the latest 4.0.8 release of VirtualBox that were more troubling. I started getting errors along the lines of:
Runtime error opening 'C:\Users\COMPUTER_NAME\.VirtualBox\Machines\VM_NAME\VM_NAME.xml' for reading: -102 (File not found.).
Once the error appeared, I wasn’t able to start the virtual machine. At first, when I went to check the directory, I saw that the file was gone. I thought I’d lost access to the whole virtual machine because of that missing file. Since the code I’d been working on was in version control outside the image, I eventually decided to use it as an excuse to download the latest version of Quickstart. After a few weeks, a similar error appeared (though a different file had gone missing this time).
That’s when I started to do some searching about the error that I realized the file was there, but had just been renamed. In essence, this forum post explains it all, but in summary, simply copy the FILENAME.xyz-prev file and rename the file to FILENAME.xyz. That fixed the problem for me on two different virtual machines.
