How can i Extract Files From VDI - virtualbox

Question

I was using VirtualBox on my PC(WIN 7)
I managed to View some files in my .VDI file..
How can I open or view the contents of my .vdi file and retrieve the files from there?

Answer 1

I had a corrupted VDI file (according to countless VDI-viewer programs I've used with cryptic errors like invalid handle, no file selected, please format disk) and I was not able to open the file, even with VirtualBox. I tried to convert it using the VirtualBox command line tools, with no success. I tried mounting it to a new virtual machine, tried mounting it with ImDisk, no dice. I read four Microsoft TechNet articles, downloaded their utilities and tried countless things; no success.
However, when I tried 7Zip (https://www.7-zip.org/download.html) I was able to view all of the files, and extract them selectively. Here's how I did it:
install 7zip (make sure that you also install the context-menu items, if prompted.)
right-click on the VDI file, select "Open Archive"
when the window appears, right click on the largest file in the archive (there should be two files, one is "Basic Microsoft Data Partition" and the other one something else, called system or something.) Left click on the largest one and click "Open inside". The file size is listed to the right of each file in bytes.
you should see all of the files inside of the archive. You can drag files that you'd like to extract right to your desktop. You can double click on folders to view inside them too.
If 7zip gives you a cryptic error after extracting the files, it means that you closed the folder's window that you are copying files to in Windows Explorer.
If you didn't close the window and you're still getting an error, try extracting each sub-folder individually. Also make sure that you have enough local hard drive space to copy the files to, even if you are copying them just to an external disk, as 7zip copies them first to your local disk. If the files are highly compressible, you might be able to get away with using NTFS compression for the AppData/temp folder so that when 7zip extracts the files locally, it'll compress them so that it can copy them over to your other disk.

Answer 2

You can mount partitions from .vdi images using qemu-nbd:
sudo apt install qemu-utils
sudo modprobe nbd
vdi="/path/to/your.vdi" # <<== Edit this
sudo qemu-nbd -c /dev/nbd0 "$vdi"
# view partitions and select the one you want to mount.
# Using parted here, but you can also use cfdisk, fdisk, etc.
sudo parted /dev/nbd0 print
part=nbd0p2 # <<== partition you want to mount
sudo mkdir /mnt/vdi
sudo mount /dev/$part /mnt/vdi
Some users seem to need to add a parameter to the modprobe command. I didn't with Ubuntu 16.04, but if it doesn't work for you, try adding max_part=16 :
sudo modprobe nbd max_part=16
When done:
sudo umount /dev/$part
sudo qemu-nbd --disconnect /dev/nbd0

Answer 3

Try out VMXray.
You can explore your vmdk image right inside your browser. Select the files that you want to extract and extract them to the desired location. Not just vmdk, you can use VMXRay for looking into and extracting files from RAW, QEMU/KVM QCOW2, Virtualbox VDI, and ISO images. ext2, ext3, FAT and NTFS are current supported file systems. You can also use this to recover deleted photos from raw dumps of your camera's SD card, for example.
And, do not worry, no data from your files is ever sent over the network. Data never leaves your machine. VMXRay works completely inside your browser.

Answer 4

As a first approach you can simply try any archive viewer to open .vdi file.
I tried 7zip to open Ubuntu Mate .vdi file and it shown all Linux file system like below.

Answer 5

An easy way is to attach the VDI as a second disk in another Virtual Machine.
The drive does not appear immediately; in Windows go to Disk Manager, bring the disk online and assign it a drive letter.

Answer 6

You can use ImDisk to mount VDI file as a local drive in Windows. Follow this virtualbox forum thread and become happy )) Also you can convert VDI to VHD and use default Windows Disk manager to mount VHD (described here)