Mount .vdi VirtualBox disk image
Assume a VirtualBox guest OS Windows 10 VDI disk image mydisk.vdi
that you wish to mount without Virtualbox, perhaps because your guest OS crashed.
Here’s how to rescue files from a crashed VirtualBox VDI.
VDI rescue disk space required
The disk space used by the cloned .img
file will be the full expanded size of the dynamic partition if one was used.
Example: dynamic partition max size was 100 GB but only 10 GB was used → clone operation uses full 100 GB.
Rescue files from VDI
Copy the VDI to IMG format
VBoxManage clonehd --format RAW mydisk.vdi mydisk.img
cd ~/"Virtualbox VMs/Windows"
Examine partition
parted mydisk.img #not sudo
unit
B
print
look for the “start” column for the biggest partition, that’s probably the virtual machine.
If you chose “12345 B”:
mount -t ntfs -o loop,ro,offset=12345 mydisk.img /mnt
It takes several minutes to unpack.
Explore the files in /mnt
as usual.
Copy out what you need.