Does Virtualbox support DMG files on non-Mac OSes?

Question

I'm trying to use a DMG as disc drive for a VirtualBox virtual machine, and I'm greeted by this very unpleasant surprise :

This reads :

Error opening optical disc file C:\Users...

Could not open the medium 'C:\Users...'

VD: error VERR_VD_DMG_INVALID_HEADER opening image file 'C:\Users...' (VERR_VD_DMG_INVALID_HEADER)

Error code : E_FAIL (0x80004005)

Component : Medium

Interface : IMedium {05f2bbb6-a3a6-4fb9-9b49-6d0dda7142ac}

Called function : IVirtualBox {fafa4e17-1ee2-4905-a10e-fe7c18bf5554}

Code returned : VBOX_E_OBJECT_NOT_FOUND (0x80BB0001)

I've searched and it seems like it's supposed to work as claimed by this post from an Oracle employee on the Virtualbox forums :

Did no one really notice that VirtualBox supports typical DMG images of CDs and DVDs on every supported host platform?

Can someone who used DMG files with Virtualbox on Windows confirm or deny this ?

Answer 1

I've been finally able to use a DMG file as an optical disc image in Virtualbox on Windows.

It seems like the first image I used wasn't compatible, despite being successfully recognized and extracted by 7-zip. However, an InstallESD.dmg image from a Mac OS X setup package worked just fine and booted in Virtualbox on a Windows 7 host.

Answer 2

VirtualBox does support DMG files. As you can see in my screenshot, when browsing from the VirtualBox medium finder, Explorer lists DMG in the "supported file types" section.

The supported file-types section gets its' information from the Windows file associations that are set when you install a program. During the installation, the program will declare which file types it supports. In this case we can see the VirtualBox has declared support for DMG format.

Answer 3

It only supports ISO DMGs. I tried to connect a Fat32 USB stick image and it says corrupted file system. Apparently it was expecting CDFS.

If you try to connect DMG as hard drive, it the dmg extension is not in supported image list.

Add HDD dialog