Cannot boot Virtualbox VM: Start tag expected, ‘<’ not found

Cannot boot Virtualbox VM: Start tag expected, ‘<’ not found

August 23, 2011, 10:48
Filed under: Ubuntu | Tags: Ubuntu, virtualbox, vm

So one day, my Windows 7 VM failed to boot, and the virtualbox console throw me this error:

Start tag expected, '<' not found.
Location: '/home/ikhsan/VirtualBox VMs/itiay-win7/itiay-win7.vbox', line 1 (0), column 1.
/home/vbox/vbox-4.0.4/src/VBox/Main/src-server/MachineImpl.cpp[679] (nsresult Machine::registeredInit()).
Result Code: NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005)
Component: VirtualBox
Interface: IVirtualBox {d2de270c-1d4b-4c9e-843f-bbb9b47269ff}

It seems that during a recent restart, the .vbox configuration file for the corresponding vm was screwed. Luckily the virtual hardisk file (.vdi) was still intact, and I was able to recover the data from the damaged VM by creating a new VM, and point the new VM to use the old .vdi from the previous VM.

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