What to do if your Vagrant VM crashes

My vagrant VM crashed. I tried typing vagrant halt but it just tried to “gracefully” shut down the machine, and stayed like that, for a long time.

What I did was open up the VirtualBox Manager and power off the machine manually.

However, now when I tried to start my VM again, it started trying to import a new base box to create the virtual machine from scratch, which was not what I wanted. I guess it must have not saved the UUID of my VM back to the .vagrant. Here’s what I had to do to fix that.

1. Get VBoxManage running

I needed to use the vboxmanage command to find the UUID of the existing virtual machine I wanted to associate with my vagrant directory. To do this I added the path containing vboxmanage.exe to my PATH variable, in my case this was C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox.

2. Find the UUID of my virtual machine

I ran vboxmanage list vms to list all VMs by UUID.

"vagrant_1349442014" {00b9a111-b18b-4609-becd-f0b77eecab17}
"vagrant_1349448525" {758d639c-e9ad-48ed-bccb-b4ae423c52ef}

And copied the UUID of the one I wanted: 00b9a111-b18b-4609-becd-f0b77eecab17

3. Update my .vagrant file

vim .vagrant

And update it with my new UUID:

{"active":{"default":"00b9a111-b18b-4609-becd-f0b77eecab17"}}

4. Start vagrant again

vagrant up

Voila!

By @nottrobin