[vbox-dev] Opening disk with existing parent?

[Klaus Espenlaub]

Rutlidge, Sarah (rutlidge) wrote:
> 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 

Please read the API description. The parent UUID you can pass there is 
for hacking up an image hierarchy if the images actually don't fit 
together. You never need this if the images are created properly, 
because then they already contain the right parent UUID information.

That said - thanks for spotting that copy/paste bug in our code when 
passing a parent UUID - it indeed triggered the wrong behavior and 
changed the image UUID.

The original problem is also a bug. Will see if it can be fixed soon. 
Your code should just open all images, starting from the base image to 
the child, and everything else should be done automatically.

Sorry about the bad news...

Klaus



>>>> 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
> 
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