[vbox-dev] Opening disk with existing parent?

[Rutlidge, Sarah (rutlidge)]

I have a scenario in which I'm supplied with three VDI files: "ubunutubase", "extrafiles1" and "extrafiles2" - extrafiles1 is a differencing disk based on ubunutubase and extrafiles2 is a differencing disk based on extrafiles1. These disks have not previously been known to my VirtualBox instance and I'd like to import the hierarchy into my VirtualBox instance programmatically.

Experimenting with IVirtualBox.openHardDisk() I can pass it a parent UUID but it seems to try and create a new drive with that UUID which is not the behavior I want in this case - here, the drive already exists and I have just imported it into 

>>> vbox = xpcom.components.classes["@virtualbox.org/VirtualBox;1"].createInstance()
>>> session = xpcom.components.classes["@virtualbox.org/Session;1"].createInstance()
>>> ifaces = xpcom.components.interfaces
>>> local_path = '/vm_images/.VirtualBox/HardDisks/{4edbe526-6d78-4ce9-885b-63dcce74de5c}.vdi'
>>> hd = vbox.openHardDisk(local_path, ifaces.AccessMode.ReadWrite, False, "", False, "")
>>> local_path = '/vm_images/.VirtualBox/HardDisks/{3e0569c2-d4fa-4a40-a7c9-f5fb148796c4}.vdi'
>>> hd = vbox.openHardDisk(local_path, ifaces.AccessMode.ReadWrite, False, "", True, "4edbe526-6d78-4ce9-885b-63dcce74de5c")
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "<XPCOMObject method 'openHardDisk'>", line 7, in openHardDisk
xpcom.Exception: 0x80070057 (Cannot register the hard disk '/vm_images/.VirtualBox/HardDisks/{3e0569c2-d4fa-4a40-a7c9-f5fb148796c4}.vdi' with UUID {4edbe526-6d78-4ce9-885b-63dcce74de5c} because a hard disk '/vm_images/.VirtualBox/HardDisks/{4edbe526-6d78-4ce9-885b-63dcce74de5c}.vdi' with UUID {4edbe526-6d78-4ce9-885b-63dcce74de5c} already exists in the media registry ('/home/sarah/.VirtualBox/VirtualBox.xml'))

This isn't quite the behaviour I would expect. I can't quite work out how creating a new parent for an existing differencing disk could possibly work and it's certainly not what I was hoping for here.

If I don't pass in the parent UUID then the create succeeds but the drive is not created as a child of the parent.

>>> hd = vbox.openHardDisk(local_path, ifaces.AccessMode.ReadWrite, False, "", False, "")

I can't currently see any other way of doing this save for moving the disks around in the VirtualBox.xml file after everything's been registered. Am I doing something wrong or is this genuinely the way the setParentId and parentId parameters are intended to work?

(Tested with versions 3.0.0 and 3.0.2)

Thanks,

-- Sarah