Why VirtualBox won't allow running both IE 7 and IE 8 with Win XP downloadable free from Microsoft?

Question

The free virtual hard drive images from Microsoft:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=21eabb90-958f-4b64-b5f1-73d0a413c8ef&DisplayLang=en

is good for testing apps or running apps on Win XP on a Mac or Win 7 system... But I have wondered why on the Mac, the VirtualBox won't allow running both the IE 7 and IE 8 virtual hard drive, saying that there is already such a device (or was it UUID).

Virtual PC can allow that... just wonder why VirtualBox won't allow that and is there any way to bypass that?

Answer 1

You can use

vboxmanage showhdinfo path\to\vhd

to show the UUIDs. If they are indeed identical, assign a new UUID with

VBoxManage internalcommands setvdiuuid path\to\vhd

or clone it with

VBoxManage clonehd

and then discard the original one.