Make note of the desired drive in the format of /dev/disk0, /dev/disk1, etc. In Max OS X, use the following command: diskutil list. Make note of the desired drive in the format of dev/sda0, dev/sda1, etc. In Linux, run the following command: sudo fdisk -l. You’ll see the associated drive numbers on the left and will identify them later as PhysicalDrive0, PhysicalDrive1, etc. Next, you’ll need to find the path and drive number of the physical drive you’d like to mount: Choose all options like normal, but when asked about the virtual hard drive, select Do not add a virtual hard drive. You’ll first want to create a virtual machine within the VirtualBox GUI. And no matter which drive or partition you want to mount, it’s always a good idea to back up any existing data on it before continuing. Warning: Do not attempt to mount or boot the partition that runs the host OS with a VM, as that can lead to severe data corruption. We’ll show how to do this when running VirtualBox on a Windows, Linux or Mac OS X host machine. This method is called VirtualBox “ raw hard disk access.” This allows you to mount or boot a secondary hard drive or external USB, for example. In today’s tutorial, we will only discuss mounting entire VirtualBox physical hard disks.

VirtualBox can mount entire physical hard disks as well as only selected partitions of a drive. Though it’s possible to create a virtual hard disk image from the existing contents of a physical drive, you might find it useful to directly mount or boot a physical drive on a virtual machine (VM).Īnd while this is fairly easy to do with the GUI of VMware and Hyper-V when configuring a VM, that isn’t the case with creating a VirtualBox physical disk, or a VirtualBox raw disk, in VirtualBox, as the process requires some CLI usage.

Windows vm on mac external drives