Integrating UUID in the hard disks is VERY bad idea

[Technologov]

Integrating UUID in the hard disks is VERY bad idea.

MS VirtualPC doesn't do it.

Basically CloneVDI changes the UUIS of the virtual hard disk, which is required to register two hard disks.

It leads to the following problems:

1. I can't use normal OS' copy command to clone VDI's. This procedure is slower than normal Operating System's copy command.

2. Some OSes fails to boot after using CloneVDI, because they mount the root partition by UUID, not by partition number. (openSUSE 10.3)

2.a. The above limitation combo of both VBox and SUSE 10.3 leaves me no ability to copy/clone virtual hard disks at all.

3. The current scheme is counter-intuitive. The simplest way, is the right way to go.

Recommendations:

1. Allow attaching "copied" VDI files, with same UUID, to different VMs, or even to single VM (if this is theoretically possible). This will behave similarly to MS Virtual PC.

2. I'm not sure, but I think Qemu doesn't haven UUIDs at all. Maybe we can go the Qemu route ?

-Alexey "Technologov"

[Achim Hasenmueller]

The use of hard disk UUIDs is part of VirtualBox' design. They are not related to what modern Linux distributions see as UUIDs.

You can use VBoxManage internalcommands setvdiuuid to assign a new one to a VDI file and with this trick copy the files yourself.

So we will not change this behavior.