If you have ever gotten this error it can cause a sinking feeling in your stomach. As good as virtual machines are and as much as I love them the one thing that can cause anxiety is if something should happens to the files that make up the virtual machine.
One Saturday morning I had to install updates on a critical mail server so like always I went to make a snapshot first. This way if something goes terribly wrong I just revert to the snapshot and I am back in business. So I right click on the virtual machine to take a snapshot. Instead of seeing in the task list the bivalent and always welcome “Completed” I saw “Detected an invalid snapshot configuration”. I thought oh no what has happened? I did some digging and someone recommended cloning the machine and that would take care of the issue. I thought that would be too easy but it worked perfectly.
How did I get into this predicament in the first place? This is a Windows 2003 Server and I needed to make some changes. I need to delete one hard drive and add another. The machine already had a snapshot on it before I made these changes. Thus the problem if you add and or delete drives while the machine has a snapshot the VM can get confused and thus you are stuck.
For me this worked. Hopefully it will help someone else.
