Fixing crashed VAGRANT machine

2 min readJul 26, 2018

I’m getting crashing troubles with VAGRANT, so I need to settle an emergency plan for this situation.

In every half year I wake up in a morning and notice my notebook completety freezed. In the most of cases this means VAGRANT has carshed, and I’will have a bad day again. I’m going through on this 4. time, but it still a real pain in the ass, so I wanna make an emergency plan for this.

Getting into your VM

If a Vagrant VM has crashed you can’t start your VAGRANT machine with a simple vagrant up command, you will get stucks, hangs, freezes, so let’s avoid VAGRANT a little bit..

Go to Virtualbox, and start the VM from there. You will see what’s happening, and maybe you will be able to reach some-kind of login screen. I had to struggle a bit with this, because I got several mounting errors. I kept trying with pushing S (Skip) and M (solve it manually) through the error messages, and reboots finally I got a read-only filesystem with a login.

If you still can’t get into your VM you can try this awesome trick:

https://superuser.com/questions/947942/unprocessed-orphan-inode-list-in-virtualbox-vm

Login into VM

If you have seen some kind of login screen, you can use these credentials:

username: vagrant
password: vagrant

Back-up with read-only filesystem

Due I couldn’t write the file-system it’s a bit hard to make backups.

So I mounted a VM shared folder from my PC so I was able to backup the files inside the Linux filesystem to my hard drive.

https://serverfault.com/questions/674974/how-to-mount-a-virtualbox-shared-folder

https://i.stack.imgur.com/Gu70v.png

sudo mount -t vboxsf var_www /var/www/

Backup files

MYSQL Database files in system level (Debian):

/var/lib/mysql/

Export

mysqldump -u root -p --all-databases > alldb.sql
mysqldump -u root -p --opt --all-databases > alldb.sql
mysqldump -u root -p --all-databases --skip-lock-tables > alldb.sql

Import

mysql -u root -p < alldb.sql

OTHER FILES/FOLDERS

I usually save the /home,/root and /etc folders, they contains the most of neccessary files.