Restoring Laravel's Homestead after critical error

Question

I'm using Homestead via Vagrant for my Laravel environment. When I ran vagrant up today, there was a critical error saying that the box is inaccessible.

One of the instructions that I found on the web suggested unregistering the VM by using its machine uuid, which I did:

> VBoxManage.exe unregistervm [uuid]

After unregistering the status of Homestead box changed from inaccessible to not created .

Next step was to register the box, which I do like this:

> VBoxManage.exe registervm "C:\Users\Rhino\VirtualBox VMs\homestead\box-disk1.vmdk"

However the command above throws the following error:

VBoxManage.exe: error: Start tag expected, '<' not found.
VBoxManage.exe: error: Location: 'C:\Users\Rhino\VirtualBox VMs\homestead\box-disk1.vmdk', line 1 (0), column 1.

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

OK, I figured it out. There was probably a step missing in the guide I found - creation. All the steps again:

(1)
Unregister the box with machine uuid. The uuid can be found eg in the .vbox-prev file in your homestead virtual machine folder. Run this when you retrieve the uuid:

C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox> VBoxManage.exe unregistervm [uuid]

(2)
Create the box with --register flag:

C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox> VBoxManage.exe createvm --name "C:\Users\Rhino\VirtualBox VMs\homestead\box-disk1.vmdk" --register

(3)
Delete the folder in which your homestead vm is kept (I guess it's by default created in VirtualBox VMs folder)

(4)
Run vagrant up