VirtualBox Error – Cannot register the DVD image because UUID already exists

I have been using Oracle VirtualBox for many years now. It helped me a lot to test and play with numerous Unix-like operating systems. I have a backup of all Virtual machines' images in my local hard disk, so that I can avoid repeated installation of the same virtual machine over and over. The other day, when I try to start my openSUSE VM, VirtualBox kept throwing the following error.

Failed to open virtual machine located in /home/sk/VirtualBox VMs/openSUSE 13.2/openSUSE 13.2.vbox.
Cannot register the DVD image '/usr/share/virtualbox/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso' {b058bc48-c451-4cff-9db0-d01c70e99c28} because a CD/DVD image '/usr/share/virtualbox/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso' with UUID {bb9b13c5-f90f-4589-b212-8b9e01f118f5} already exists.

I haven't seen this error before and I have no idea how to solve it. After a bit of Google search, I found a workaround to fix this issue. Have you ever been in the same situation where you didn't know how to solve this problem? No worries! Just follow these steps and you're good to go!

Fix "Cannot register the DVD image because UUID already exists" Error In VirtualBox

To fix the aforementioned error, go to the directory where you have stored the Virtual Machine files. For instance, I have stored my VMs in /home/sk/VirtualBox VMs/ directory.

Open the .VBOX file in any text editor of your choice.

Here is a sample Vbox file for your reference.

It’s an XML file, so you can open it with any graphical or text editing software such as Libre Office, Abiword, Vi, and nano etc.

Then, find the following lines:

[...]
<DVDImages>
        <Image uuid="{b058bc48-c451-4cff-9db0-d01c70e99c28}"
location="/usr/share/virtualbox/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso"/>
     
[...]

Delete all entries between <DVDImages> and </DVDImages> section. After deleting the contents, your .VBOX file will look like below.

<DVDImages>
</DVDImages>

Save and close the file.

That's it. Now, you can load the virtual machine without any issues.

Alternatively, you can properly release the disk image medium from command line, run this vboxmanage command:

$ vboxmanage closemedium disk b058bc48-c451-4cff-9db0-d01c70e99c28

Replace "b058bc48-c451-4cff-9db0-d01c70e99c28" with your UUID value.

Related read:

• How To Fix "hard disk with UUID already exists" Issue In VirtualBox