VBoxManage: Error: Cannot register the hard disk

By xngo on July 10, 2019

Issue

You get the following error because you deleted the hard drive outside of VirtualBox Manager and you recreate the same hard drive with the same path:

VBoxManage.exe: error: Cannot register the hard disk '....'{793cc103-f353-4599-aca5-a592a2a885c2} because a hard disk '....' with UUID {81898476-abbe-4a2a-93a9-de3519af209b} already exists

Solution

vboxmanage closemedium disk "/path/to/your/hd.vdi"
# Then, recreate your hard drive. E.g.:
VBoxManage createhd --filename "/path/to/your/hd.vdi" --size 2048 --variant Fixed

About the author

Xuan Ngo is the founder of OpenWritings.net. He currently lives in Montreal, Canada. He loves to write about programming and open source subjects.