Mount an external SATA disk on a Virtualbox Guest

Question

I have an external EXT3-formatted hard disk attached via SATA to a Windows machine running a Linux Virtualbox guest.

I'd like to mount the disk in the Linux environment, but can't figure out how to do it.

I've been able to mount external disks by choosing the disk from the "USB devices" list in Virtualbox, but this disk doesn't show up there.

Can someone point me in the right direction? Thanks!

Answer 1

You could try mounting the external disk as a VM hard disk.

VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename path\to\virtualdisk.vmdk -rawdisk \\.\PhysicalDriveX

path\to\virtualdisk.vmdk is the file that will be created after you run the command. You can then mount this a virtual drive on the guest OS under the Storage settings for the guest.

\\.\PhysicalDriveX where X is the drive number of the external drive (e.g. 0, 1, 2, 3) is the physical path to the disk. If you only have one internal disk, and the one external disk the number will most likely be 1. It should correspond to the order the disk is listed in the Device Manager.

There is an article on sysprobs.com that describes this in much more detail.

Note: If the installation directory of Virtual Box is not in your PATH environment variable, you may need to cd into the directory where virtual box is installed (i.e. cd "C:\Program Files\Sun\VirtualBox")