Use physical harddisk in Virtual Box

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I made a smug comment ("Straight forward") when this question was originally posted and found myself at this page some months later looking for the same answer

Today, I managed to boot from physical drives. This achievement required;

Dear reader, your attention is directed at the fact that it is equally straight forward to kill your data when the disc is accessed in this manner. The procedure on how to accomplish this is left as an exercise...

To create an image that represents an entire physical hard disk (which will not contain any actual data, as this will all be stored on the physical disk), on a Linux host, use the command

You must have read access to the physical disk device file /dev/sda. To accomplish this you can either change the owner and access rights of the device file or run VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk… as root (put sudo before the command).

On a Windows host, instead of the above device specification, use e.g. \\.\PhysicalDrive0 (see "Enumerating physical drives in Windows" section below). On a Mac OS X host, use e.g. /dev/disk1 (and unmount all partitions on disk1).

internal commands are no longer used in 2023, virtual box 7, so do this instead:

VM -> Settings -> Storage -> add ide / sata -> Choose existing disk -> browse

File -> Virtual Media Manager -> e.g raw-0.vmdk -> [modify] -> (o) Writethrough

VM -> Settings -> System -> Boot order

VM -> Settings -> Storage -> Controller: SATA -> e.g. raw-5.vmdk -> Hard Disk: Sata Port 0

Enumerating physical drives in Windows:

You can also get the drive numbers with PowerShell:

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edited Nov 12, 2023 at 23:29

answered May 20, 2014 at 20:57

Ярослав РахматуллинЯрослав Рахматуллин

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The VirtualBox documentation refers to accessing a raw hard disk:

http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.html#rawdisk

See the documentation for caveats and Windows-specific instructions.

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edited Aug 5, 2015 at 16:24

answered Oct 31, 2012 at 1:53

trpt4himtrpt4him

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Just want to elaborate how to do this in Windows 10

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edited Jun 28, 2021 at 10:39

Gustavo

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answered May 31, 2020 at 11:27

JamesJames

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I was unable to get this working in Windows 10 for the longest time; I kept getting a VERR_ACCESS_DENIED error when attempting to attach the VMDK.

However, I was (finally) able to get this working with a few tricks:

...where path\to\physical\disk\file.vmdk is the file that will be created to represent the disk and [n] is the disk number (use Disk Management to obtain this number)
3. Run the following command to attach the VMDK:

...where [CONTROLLER] is the name of the disk controller you are attaching to - "IDE" in my case
4. Run the following command to start the VM:

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answered Oct 26, 2019 at 5:24

Nathan OsmanNathan Osman

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I was attempting to boot a Linux VM (specifically Ubuntu 19.10) on macOS where Ubuntu is installed on a physical ext4 formatted partition. Many of the answers I found, including that from @ЯрославРахматуллин got me most of the way there, but I kept getting the following error message:

One answer referred to booting into a LiveCD and then altering the GRUB configuration to address this. However, I don't even have GRUB installed on my Mac. Eventually, I found the key for my situation was to ensure the VM had access to the EFI partition on my physical disk, and to enable EFI support in the VM settings.

Below is the output of diskutil list from my host Mac machine:

From this, I generated the VMDK file as follows, giving the guest VM read-only access to the EFI partition and full write access to the NTFS (3) and Ext4 (5) partitions.

Now I can dual-boot MacOS or Ubuntu, and when already in MacOS, I can boot Ubuntu as a VM if needed. Happy days!

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answered Nov 7, 2019 at 13:43

John RixJohn Rix

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I found that to add the raw vmdk file to a vbox guest (Running ubuntu as host) one needs to change the permissions of the /dev/sdx file to 777 before building the vmdk file.

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answered Jan 16, 2020 at 16:48

user1130560user1130560

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I got this mostly working with a Windows host and Linux guest by following the accepted answer.

However, I ran into the problem that the physical drive numbering in Windows doesn't stay the same across reboots. This is apparently the expected behaviour for disk numbering:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/physicaldrive-numbering-keeps-changing-between/6f7a60e0-1a83-4f67-a0ca-c1ad230dc37b

So technically, if you have a Windows host and a Linux guest, you should take an extra step: check the output of wmic diskdrive list brief again before you run the VM. If the numbering is different than it was when you created the VM, then don't run it. Otherwise, there's a risk that it will boot the Windows hard drive from within itself, which is the dangerous behaviour that they warn you about (hasn't seemed to cause any permanent damage in my case though). Or, if you prefer, create a second VM with the hard drives swapped, and choose which one to start based on the output of wmic diskdrive list brief. It should be possible to do all this in a script, but the script would be dependent on your system.

Or, perhaps simpler, make Linux the host and Windows the guest, if possible. Linux can get a consistent drive identification using /dev/disk/by-id/..., as mentioned in a comment.

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answered May 18, 2020 at 16:47

user2596667user2596667

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Start with this answer, and modify as follows for Windows 11 and VirtualBox 7.0.8:

select Redhat8.vmdk (filename from createmedium statement)

This works (as you might have guessed) with RHEL 8.8.

The answer here (nearby) is helpful to keep your sanity around the seemingly capricious PhysicalDisk assignments from Windows. Essentially, use wmic diskdrive list brief

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edited Dec 31, 2023 at 17:36

answered Jun 4, 2023 at 22:52

wistlowistlo

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MacOS 10.14:

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answered Aug 25, 2019 at 22:56

Max MalyshMax Malysh

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I'm using a Linux host and Windows 10 guest. My problem is that the Windows physical drive changes on every boot - it's ranged from /dev/sdc to /dev/sdm.

My solution was to create a script thats runs on startup. It detects the drive with the WIN10 label, and then uses sed to replace the device in the .vmdk file to the current drive device.

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answered Jul 25, 2020 at 11:11

Coop.ComputerCoop.Computer

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