I was trying to update my VLC software because it was having problems, and ran the command to remove it. That popped up with a list of dependencies to be removed, and like an idiot who has no idea what he’s doing, I said yes. That kicked me out to a command prompt and now I’m trying to figure out how to recover from it.
After a lot of googling I’m realizing I seriously screwed that up. I can’t find any way to reinstall all the things I removed, and saw one post that suggested standing up a new workstation and associating my old drive with that. I’m now googling around trying to figure out how to do that.
Can anyone point me at an article that will show me how to take the vdi file from the old workstation and mount it on a new one so I can at least get all my data off of it?
You should be able to use a virtual console (command prompt) to transfer files from Whonix-Workstation to your host or HDD using the shared folder. Then copy the file to a new Whonix VM.
To find the vdi file you can use these commands
In screwed up Whonix-Workstation virtual console, change to the root directory
cd /
In Whonix-Workstation virtual console, find all instances of vdi
A recent example is VLC in Debian jessie, which reached end-of-life status in May, 2018. Therefore, a different media player should be used until Whonix 14 is released, because VLC in jessie has current unpatched security vulnerabilities.