I’ve recently started using Vagrant for building local VMs with VirtualBox. It’s a great way to test out my Chef cookbooks.

I recently ran into an error after a system crash. When I tried to run:

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vagrant up

the following error was reported:

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The VM import failed! Try running `VBoxManage import` on the box file manually
for more verbose error output.

To successfully run VBoxManage import, you first need to locate the .ovf file used by Vagrant when building your VM. Typically, you’ll find your box definitions in the ~/.vagrant/boxes directory. So, I tried to run the command specified from there:

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cd ~/.vagrant/boxes/base

VBoxManage import box.ovf

ERROR: Cannot register the hard disk
'~/.vagrant/boxes/base/vagrant-centos64-disk.vmdk' with UUID
{5d2426bf-f04e-40a0-bf36-a27c8d45f920} because a hard disk
'~/.vagrant/boxes/base/vagrant-centos64-disk.vmdk' with UUID
{5d2426bf-f04e-40a0-bf36-a27c8d45f920} already exists in the media registry
('~/Library/VirtualBox/VirtualBox.xml')

To get around this, I simply removed ~/Library/VirtualBox/VirtualBox.xml. I was then able to vagrant up and continue on with my Chef cookbook.