Mounting drives (physical & image) on VirtualBox

To mount a physical hard disk onto a VirtualBox guest, we need to first create a VMDK configuration file which points to the physical disk, and then attach this VMDK file to the VirtualBox guest.

VirtualBox running on Linux:

VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename ~/sdd.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/sdd

Now attach ~/sdd.vmdk to your guest as normal

VirtualBox running on Windows:

VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename c:\PhysicalDrive0.vmdk -rawdisk \ \ . \PhysicalDrive0

“\ \ . \PhysicalDrive0″ Is the DeviceID as seen by Windows, it can be found from the command:

wmic diskdrive list brief

Now attach c:\PhysicalDrive0.vmdk to your guest as normal

Mounting a disk image (made with dd):

Create a .vmdk config file as above. Use any attached hard disk. Even one in use. Then tweak it to point to your dd image file.

The .vmdk config file is a simple text file. Here’s my tweaked version with some comments.

# Disk DescriptorFile

##MYC## So the only things I actually changed were the CID, the number of sectors and the file location
##MYC## Then I commented out the original uuid lines 

##MYC## CID must be different for each device mounted
version=1
CID=6efb06b0
parentCID=ffffffff
createType="fullDevice"

# Extent description
##MYC## This number is the number of 512 byte sectors. The dd image filesize_in_bytes / 512 
RW 625142528 FLAT "/3tb/ryph-newpc-images/eden-pc-final.dd" 0

# The disk Data Base 
#DDB

ddb.virtualHWVersion = "4"
ddb.adapterType="ide"

##MYC## Apparently the geometry parameters don't matter if the disk is greater than 8GB. Just leave them as they were

ddb.geometry.cylinders="16383"
ddb.geometry.heads="16"
ddb.geometry.sectors="63"

##MYC## I commented out the uuid params. But I think they will get created again when you attach it
##MYC## ddb.uuid.image="6b29d83e-c656-40cf-919d-f8b2219761d2"
##MYC## ddb.uuid.parent="00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000"
##MYC## ddb.uuid.modification="5b4f167c-9bab-4e6a-935a-9dcf2ee9bc20"
##MYC## ddb.uuid.parentmodification="00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000"

ddb.geometry.biosCylinders="1024"
ddb.geometry.biosHeads="255"
ddb.geometry.biosSectors="63"