How to open existing VMs in VirtualBox?
Problem
I recently got a new workstation and I moved my VirtualBox and VMWare Player VMs from the old PC to the new. The VMWare Player VMs are a snap: you go to “File -> Open a Virtual Machine…”, find the .vmx files from the old PC, and voila! It’s up and running. All the required files apparently are in the same folder. With VirtualBox there just doesn’t seem to be a way to do that. Looks like VMs are tied to the original host in some magical/invisible way like registry entries, etc.
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1 Fix
Fix for: How to open existing VMs in VirtualBox?
The previous answers appear obsolete. As of version 4 of the Oracle VirtualBox Manager, the "Add" option is hidden in the "Machine" menu (which is an operating system menu). Just select Add, and navigate to the .vbox file you want. This works great even if the vbox file is on an external drive: if the drive is later removed, the missing boxes are simply marked as 'inaccessible'.
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