Convert a USB drive into a Virtual Machine HDD

Question

I am creating a bootable USB flash drive to install the OS and application on several PC.

I need to test UFD in virtual machine with VMware (or VirtualBox).

I could make a raw image of the UFD and convert it to a vmdk disk with "qemu"

qemu-img convert -O vmdk imagefile.img imagefile.vmdk

or I can use raw2vmdk.

To speed up process:

1. Is it possible to make a raw image of the UFD based only on the actual data (used sectors)?

2. Is it at least possible to have a direct process? That is from UFD to VMDK without passing via a raw image. But I would avoid solutions with physical UFD access which oblige me to keep my UFD plugged.

Obviously the solutions should allow the reverse, i.e. copy the virtual drive onto the UFD.

Answer 1

VirtualBox with USB passthrough presents the USB device to the guest OS, from where you can use any disk tool you have available to copy the contents (at whatever level - blocks or files) to a virtual HDD of several formats VirtualBox supports.