On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 09:44:43AM +0200, NoxDaFox wrote: You would have to launch a new handle each time[*]. Obviously it is essential that you pass the 'readonly' flag to add_drive (not doing so will result in very real disk corruption). Since the disks are being updated while you're trying to read them, there's no guarantee that you won't see some sort of transient error on the libguestfs side, which you can deal with by just closing the handle and retrying. Rich. [*] Except if using libguestfs >= 1.20 + virtio-scsi + libvirt, in which case it may be possible to call guestfs_remove_drive to hotplug the disk. http://libguestfs.org/guestfs.3.html#hotplugging -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones libguestfs lets you edit virtual machines. Supports shell scripting, bindings from many languages. http://libguestfs.org